At the hotel, an old leg-break injury starts to ache; the old injury throbs and reminds her of her pains from the past, pains that still seem to impede her life. She's again reminded of Buddy, the thorn in her side, and how she broke her leg skiing with him. Chapter 8 is a recall of her visit to Buddy's sanatorium, how Mr. Willard took her there and told her on the trip that he and Mrs. Willard always wanted a daughter like her. She feels dull and disappointed on this gray trip, partly because it was the day after Christmas; when she sees Buddy's liver-colored habitation, she is even more depressed. In addition, Buddy has become fat. And in this terrible setting, he asks her to marry him. No wonder she thinks American men have no intuition. Buddy is certainly a klutz. But then, the reader can see that both Buddy and Esther are very adolescent and very inexperienced. She responds by telling Buddy that she'll never marry.
They go skiing, and Buddy tries to help her, even though Esther thinks that what he suggests is foolhardy. But, having suicidal thoughts, she decides to try to go down a big hill even though she doesn't know how to zig-zag. She seems easily influenced to self-destructiveness. Thus she flies to the bottom of the hill and is "doing fine until the man stepped into her path." She breaks her leg in two places and believes that Buddy is really quite happy about it. Throughout the story, Esther is "doing fine" until something or someone — a man usually — steps in her path. Then things go awry, and she always ends up as a crumpled mess. In college, the chemistry class stepped in her path, and in New York City, violent sex stepped into the crowded streets in the guise of Lenny. Later, when Esther goes home, we discover that the letter of non-acceptance for the male instructor's writing course had arrived; this letter ruins Esther's summer plans. We recall, then, when Esther was nine: her father died unexpectedly, ruining her idyllic life. Esther seems bent on rushing towards her projected goals, and she doesn't know what to do when the plans are changed, especially when they are changed by a force outside herself, usually a man.
