Chapter 14 begins in darkness. Esther is in a cocoon-like silence; someone is moaning, and Esther feels cool winds and weights and then she feels a chisel on her eyes. Is she in an underground chamber? A voice cries, "Mother!" Then she feels warmth on her face. She opens her eyes but she can't see, and a cheery voice tells her that she'll marry a nice blind man someday. Later, when Esther tells the doctor that a nurse told her that she is blind, he says, "Nonsense," and tells her that she is lucky to be alive and will be fine. Esther's mother comes to see her because, she says, she had been told that Esther called out for her; then Esther's brother asks her how she is. Esther replies, "The same."
Esther's next visitor is the asylum's houseman, a fellow named George Bakewell, who was only slightly acquainted with Esther from her activities in church and at college. Esther becomes angry (at least, the reader thinks so), and she tells George to get out. But Esther is not angry; she has only turned her face to the wall because she thinks that George wants to see how a crazy girl looks. Esther then asks for a mirror, and against the nurse's wishes, she takes it and breaks it.
Esther is taken by ambulance to a state medical hospital where they have a "special ward" for her kind; it is implied that Esther is too violent to remain where she is. In this new institution, Esther encounters a Mrs. Tomolillo who has been hospitalized for sticking her tongue out continuously at her French-Canadian mother-in-law. When Mrs. Greenwood comes to visit Esther, this strange woman starts to mock Esther's mother, but Mrs. Greenwood doesn't notice. She is worried only about why Esther won't cooperate with the doctors — who are called Doctor Syphilis and Doctor Pancreas by Esther because she can't remember their real names. Esther tells her mother to get her out of this place, and her mother says that she'll try if Esther will promise to "be good." "I promise," Esther says in a loud, conspicuous voice.
