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clouds with the ballyhooers and down in the streets among the hungering folk.
    But work had come to so dominate George’s life that he could no longer name most of his fellow boarders, and where he used to walk the mile and a half to and from the Monadnock, taking in the faces he passed on the street or stopping to chat with waffle vendors, newsboys, laundresses, market gardeners, now he took the grip to the office and stared into middle space, avoiding commuters’ eyes, his thoughts fixed on selling soap with his Tidy Town cartoons. Ma Kavanagh had half-jokingly threatened George with eviction. “I’d be doing you a favor, son. You haven’t had a date since Hector was a pup. How can you meet a nice girl when you’re living in a room with a slanted floor over a tobacconist?”
    When he had boarded the train in Winesburg with a trunk and his father’s warning, “Be a sharp one. That’s the ticket. Don’t let anyone think you’re a greenhorn,” he never would have imagined that upon reaching the downslope of his twenties he’d still be unmarried, unattached. He had assumed he would get together again with his adored Helen White. But it seemed a lifetime ago that Helen had gone east to Cleveland for college, and George had made his way to the “Gomorrah of the West.” He hadn’t heard from Helen in four years, had lost touch with those in Winesburg who would know what had become of her. She might have continued east, to New York or Boston, and settled down with some high-nosed stockholder her parents would approve of. Funny to think that George had reached a position where Banker and Mrs. White might finally say he was good enough for their daughter. Maybe Helen had children and had forgotten that night at the empty fairgrounds, how she and George had run laughing down Waterworks Hill, then picked themselves up and walked home in regardful silence.
    George fled the cold, following the crowd into the main entrance of Marshall Field’s. The flower girl and Helen White, his worry that his days at the agency were numbered, and a dread now flooding him that he would spend the rest of his holidays alone were like hands guiding him into the vast shopping emporium, past the Christmas tree that seemed to soar clear up to the gold-domed ceiling, past the bough-strung perfume counters and the carolers singing “Joy to the World.” Until, puzzlingly, here he was, leaning over the sparkling glass of the jewelry cases.
    A saleswoman in an absinthe-green dress asked, “May I help you?” Thin as a stem, with her white hair swept up, she resembled a tulip at the end of the season.
    â€œYes, I’m looking for an engagement ring,” George heard himself say.
    And that’s when his mind finally turned to Margaret Lazar, his boss’s daughter, who two weeks ago at her twenty-first birthday party had confessed to George that she believed she might be in love with him. They were in her parents’ library at the time, and the news had come as such a shock that all George could manage in response was, “You can’t be serious.”
    Margaret grasped his wrist. “I know it’s unconventional for a woman to say such things to a man, but these are different times, and I’m old enough now to make my own decisions.”
    â€œWhat of all your suitors?” George gestured toward the other room, where sons of the Lake Shore Drive elite had arranged themselves in polite antipathy.
    â€œPrigs and fops, all hand-selected by my mother,” Margaret whispered.
    â€œBut we hardly know each other,” George said. Which was true and not true. He had always thought of her as the daughter of Alfred Lazar, a frequent visitor at the office and sometime summer employee. When he’d first met her she was just thirteen, and though she had filled out her satin dress, traveled to Paris, Vienna, and Florence, and attended the University of