From what we have seen of the squalor of Pecolas home life, we might imagine that a more orderly life in a middle-class home would give her a happier existence. But in this chapter, it becomes clear that material comfort, neatness, and quiet can become deadly themselves if not accompanied by genuine human warmth. The chapter opens with a deceptively positive description of the kind of woman that we will learn to hate by the chapter's close. Her hometown
has a beautiful name, and her girlhood involves a close relationship to the beauties of nature. She is soft and sweet, not shrill and hard like some of her urban sisters. She smells good and sings in church. But all these details exist only to drive home the point that such surface troits say little about a person's inner goodness, and, in fact, can be misleading,