The next two scenes give us a humorous but chilling view of a large state mental hospital. A black man is serving the patients some food out of tin tureens, and Esther perceptively sees that he has never encountered "crazy people" before. At the dinner table one day, Esther removes the lid from a container and takes some green beans; she passes it to the woman — Mrs. Mole — next to her, and then Mrs. Mole dumps the whole thing on her plate and then is led away by a nurse. The other foods they receive are baked beans and cold, sticky macaroni. When the black waiter and Esther exchange words, she kicks him in the leg.
In the next scene, Esther is in bed and doesn't want to get up. When a nurse sets a tray of thermometers on her bed, Esther (accidentally, on purpose) shoves them off so that they all break. This scene takes place just after Esther has thought how she'd like to explain that she'd rather have something wrong with her body than something wrong with her mind. But it seems too tiring to try to explain, and the medical personnel are only custodians, anyway. After they lock the door, Esther scoops up some gray mercury to play with. These little separate pieces of mercury can, seemingly, be pushed into a whole again. Esther smiles at the silver ball and wonders what they have done with Mrs. Mole, the lady who dumped the green string beans. The point is clear: people's minds are not as easy to make whole again as droplets of gray mercury are.
Esther has gone from inertia and depression into attempting suicide, and in four chapters we see in graphic detail how her mind is working — especially on various ways to kill herself and the features of her environment and the people around her. But Dr. Gordon's original question of "what is wrong" has not even begun to be answered. We see that Esther's father's death has affected her very deeply, and that her mother's nurturing is, for the most part, only an exercise in duty. But why cannot Esther get herself beyond the details and find a reason for an existence? The mercury may be silver, but things are still dull and gray for Esther — in spite of her cleverness.
