This chapter is significant for its presentation of Mademoiselle Reisz's abode, an apartment highly symbolic of her life and of the life of an artist and independent person. Mademoiselle Reisz tries to avoid the traffic of ordinary life, choosing a top floor apartment to "discourage the approach of beggars, peddlers, and callers." Her unrelenting honesty about human nature and the prescribed niceties of genteel culture underlie her desire to be removed from such pedestrian distractions.
Mademoiselle Reisz's frank appraisal of others' behaviors and virtues (or lack thereof) renders her unlikable to most everyone. Her respect for honesty is such, however, that she is "greatly pleased" by Edna's candid admission that she doesn't know whether or not she actually likes her.
Mademoiselle Reisz's isolation, both physical and social, provides more time for her art and herself. Yet there are disadvantages to her existence, as well. While she has many windows in her front room (the equivalent of a living room), they are terribly dirty, a testament to not only her lack of interest in housekeeping but also to the economic limits on single women. If she had married, she could likely afford plusher accommodations and a servant or two. The windows' filthy condition doesn't matter much, however, because they are "nearly always open," allowing in "a good deal of smoke and soot; but at the same time all the light and air that there was." With the freedom of fresh air comes the soot and smoke but Mademoiselle Reisz has learned to live with the bad that accompanies the good — just as she has learned to live with the physical and societal limitations of a single woman who insists on telling the truth.
The depiction of freedom's limitations continues with the description of her three small rooms: A "magnificent piano crowded the apartment" while she has only a gas stove for cooking and "a rare old buffet, dingy and battered" in which to keep her things. The contents of her apartment reflect her priorities. While her surroundings are not particularly comfortable, they are hers, maintained under her own terms. Mademoiselle Reisz is not attractive, rich, or well liked but has carved out an independent life nonetheless. As she plays for Edna, the music "floated out upon the night" just as the mockingbird of the first chapters, her symbolic counterpart, was "whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence." Although caged, he mocks listeners with his insistence on playing his own tune just as Mademoiselle Reisz taunts others with her honesty and independence of thought and lifestyle.
