The Chaperone

The story returns to 1922 during Cora and Louise’s train journey to New York. Cora awakens from a nap to find Louise gone and tracks her down in the dining car at a table with two strange men. Horrified, she sits at the table with the three to salvage the situation. It turns out that the men are from the town where Cora grew up with the Kaufmanns. This allusion to Cora’s life with the Kaufmanns foreshadows the next chapter’s flashback.

Cora eats the leftovers from Louise’s lunch to shorten their encounter with the men and then takes Louise back to their seats, where she tries to tell Louise that she shouldn’t associate with strange men. She says, “Men don’t want candy that’s been unwrapped. Maybe for a lark, but not when it comes to marriage. It may still be perfectly clean, but if it’s unwrapped, they don’t know where it’s been” (71). Louise laughs at Cora’s comparison of maidenly virtue to candy and pointedly offers Cora a homemade lollipop. Later in the novel, Louise reveals to Cora that she was sexually molested by grown men as a child; these experiences explain her cynicism about sexual purity.