PSAT Reading Practice Test 41: Fiction: "Adventure"

Questions 1-9 refer to the following information.

The passage below is adapted from "Adventure," in Sherwood Anderson's 1919 short-story collection Winesburg, Ohio.

Alice Hindman, a woman of twenty-seven when George Willard was a mere boy, had lived
in Winesburg all her life. She clerked in Winney's Dry Goods Store and lived with her mother,
who had married a second husband.
At twenty-seven Alice was tall and somewhat slight. Her head was large and overshadowed
05her body. Her shoulders were a little stooped and her hair and eyes brown. She was very quiet
but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on.
When she was a girl of sixteen and before she began to work in the store, Alice had an affair
with a young man. The young man, named Ned Currie, was older than Alice. He, like George
Willard, was employed on the Winesburg Eagle and for a long time he went to see Alice almost
10every evening. Together the two walked under the trees through the streets of the town and
talked of what they would do with their lives. Alice was then a very pretty girl and Ned Currie
took her into his arms and kissed her. He became excited and said things he did not intend to
say and Alice, betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come into her rather narrow
life, also grew excited. She also talked. The outer crust of her life, all of her natural diffidence
15and reserve, was torn away and she gave herself over to the emotions of love. When, late in the
fall of her sixteenth year, Ned Currie went away to Cleveland where he hoped to get a place
on a city newspaper and rise in the world, she wanted to go with him. With a trembling voice
she told him what was in her mind. "I will work and you can work," she said. "I do not want
to harness you to a needless expense that will prevent your making progress. Don't marry me
20now. We will get along without that and we can be together. Even though we live in the same
house no one will say anything. In the city we will be unknown and people will pay no attention
to us."
Ned Currie was puzzled by the determination and abandon of his sweetheart and was
also deeply touched. He had wanted the girl to become his mistress but changed his mind.
25He wanted to protect and care for her. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said
sharply; "you may be sure I'll let you do no such thing. As soon as I get a good job I'll come
back. For the present you'll have to stay here. It's the only thing we can do."
On the evening before he left Winesburg to take up his new life in the city, Ned Currie went
to call on Alice. They walked about through the streets for an hour and then got a rig from
30Wesley Moyer's livery and went for a drive in the country. The moon came up and they found
themselves unable to talk. In his sadness the young man forgot the resolutions he had made
regarding his conduct with the girl.
They got out of the buggy at a place where a long meadow ran down to the bank of Wine
Creek and there in the dim light became lovers. When at midnight they returned to town they
35were both glad. It did not seem to them that anything that could happen in the future could
blot out the wonder and beauty of the thing that had happened. "Now we will have to stick
to each other, whatever happens we will have to do that," Ned Currie said as he left the girl at
her father's door.
The young newspaper man did not succeed in getting a place on a Cleveland paper and
40went west to Chicago. For a time he was lonely and wrote to Alice almost every day. Then he
was caught up by the life of the city; he began to make friends and found new interests in life.
In Chicago he boarded at a house where there were several women. One of them attracted his
attention and he forgot Alice in Winesburg. At the end of a year he had stopped writing letters,
and only once in a long time, when he was lonely or when he went into one of the city parks
45and saw the moon shining on the grass as it had shone that night on the meadow by Wine
Creek, did he think of her at all.