Maud Martha

Time and tone shift rapidly at the opening of this chapter. Maud is now high school age and sits in her living room waiting for her date Charles to arrive. Charles is white, and Maud has only interacted with him at school until now; and she realizes that she prefers to keep that social distance between them. She looks at her surroundings with a newly critical eye: “Mantel with scroll decorations that usually seemed rather elegant but which since morning had become unspeakably vulgar, impossible” (16). In addition to the living room’s appearance, Maud becomes concerned about the home possibly smelling unpleasant, and she opens the windows to let fresh air into the room. When Charles arrives, Maud is sickened to realize that she feels grateful to him for calling on her.

Maud is 16 years old. As she leaves the Regal theater, she observes that the performance was only a temporary escape for the theatergoers: “For a hot half hour it had put that light gauze across its little miseries and monotonies, but now here they were again, ungauzed, self-assertive, cancerous as ever” (20). Maud’s thoughts go from the audience to the performers, and she decides she wants neither fame nor stardom: “She was going to keep herself to herself” (21).