The music instructor. He taught a course in what was wrong with Southern church music. He was from New Jersey,” said Herbert.
Jean Louise had a sinking feeling. The Hundred Years’ War had progressed to approximately its twenty-sixth year with no indications of anything more than periods of uneasy truce.
With her head on his shoulder, Jean Louise was content. It might work after all, she thought. But I am not domestic. I don’t even know how to run a cook. What do ladies say to each other when they go visiting? I’d have to wear a hat. I’d drop the babies and kill ’em.
There was no mistaking it, Albert had stuck out his tongue at her. She was pregnant. Jean.
Wouldn’t you stay in the house if you didn’t want to come out?
I don’t call fifty very old,” said Miss Maudie tartly.
That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.
Miss Maudie settled her bridgework. “You know old Mr. Radley was a foot-washing Baptist – ” “That’s what you are, ain’t it?” “My shell’s not that hard, child. I’m just a Baptist.
Where she would have had a spirited argument only, and exchange of ideas, a clash of hard and different points of view with a friend, with him she had tried to obliterate him.
Henry never attempted to pester her when she was thus. His attitude was Asquithian, and he knew she appreciated him for his patience. She did not know he was learning that virtue from her father. “Relax, son,” Atticus had told him in one of his rare comments on her. “Don’t push her. Let her go at her own speed. Push her and every mule in the county’d be easier to live with.
It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had been one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing, keeping up with Jem, and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess. When she was calm enough to listen, she considered that a cruel practical joke had been played upon her: she must now go into a world of femininity, a world she despised, could not comprehend nor defend herself against, a world that did not want her.
She sat there in front of me and she didn’t see me, she saw white folks.
I mean this: every time I come home, I feel like I’m coming back to the world, and when I leave Macomb it’s like leaving the world.
Every nerve in her body shrieked, then died. She was numb.
I must soon enter this world, where on its surface fragrant ladies rocked slowly, fanned gently, and drank cool water.
That her son had developed all the latent characteristics of a three-dollar bill escaped her notice – all she knew was that she was glad he lived in Birmingham because he was oppressively devoted to her, which meant that she felt obliged to make an effort to reciprocate, which she could not with any spontaneity do.
Aunty said no, that’s where we got our small hands and feet.
When we reached the auditorium, the whole town was there except Atticus and the ladies worn out from decorating, and the usual outcasts and shut-ins.
She gave lip service to the world: she went through the motions of complying with the regulations governing the behavior of teenaged girls from good families; she developed a halfway interest in clothes, boys, hairdos, gossip, and female aspirations; but she was uneasy all the time she was away from the security of those who she knew loved her.
No, she didn’t. Alexandra saw what Maycomb saw: Maycomb expected every daughter to do her duty. The duty of his only daughter to her widowed father after the death of his only son was clear: Jean Louise would return and make her home with Atticus; that was what a daughter did, and she who did not was no daughter.