girth was immense, his neck thin, his legsfeeble.
He was dirty. Everything about him was un-
clean. Even the whites of his eyes looked soiled.

I go too fast. Not everything about Wash
was unclean. He took care of his hands. His
fingers were fat, but there was something sensi-
tive and shapely in the hand that lay on the table
by the instrument in the telegraph office. In his
youth Wash Williams had been called thebest
telegraph operator in the state, and in spite of
his degradement to the obscure office at Wines-
burg, he was still proud of his ability.

Wash Williams did not associate with themen
of the town in which he lived. "I'll have noth-
ing to do with them," he said, looking with bleary
eyes at the men who walked along the station plat-
form past the telegraph office. Up along Main
Street he went in the evening to EdGriffith's sa-
loon, and after drinking unbelievable quantities of
beer staggered off to his room in the New Willard
House and to his bed for the night.

Wash Williams was a man of courage. A
thing had happened to him that made him hate
life, and he hated it whole-heartedly, with the
abandon of a poet. First of all, he hated women.
"Bitches," he called them. His feeling toward
men was somewhat different. He pitied them.
"Does not every man let his life be managed for
him by some bitch or another?" he asked.

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