She wonders if her college career would have been more successful if she had taken a stricter program rather than the liberal, unstructured program which she decided on. She wonders if she should drop out of college and work for a while; note too that she is not sleeping well, and so she gets a new, large prescription of sleeping medication.
The reader can see that Esther is burnt-out, adrift, and ripe for a major nervous breakdown. This girl is ill with indecision; she is swamped with ideas, but she cannot focus on a single idea. She cannot organize herself, or even organize a simple plan of action for her remaining summer weeks. She is drowning in her confusion, and there is no one there to lead her — not even a Fascist-type person like Marco. She has no disciplinarian, absolutely no one, and not a soul who she feels understands her. She has returned Buddy's letter with only a catty scrawled note written in the margin. She is convinced that she has no friends — except her sleeping pills.
If a tissue of lies and disappointments surrounds Esther, then, the one defect in herself that she keeps focusing on is her unpreparedness for her future. She realizes that she doesn't know the poem Beowulf as well as most English majors do, and she wonders if her special scholastic privileges were what she really needed. Thus, it is not just indecision about what to do with her summer, or with her life, that is affecting Esther. She is starting to question every path and every experience of her life. She has skipped the regular scholastic requirements, and especially the courses in eighteenth-century literature, with "all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason." Now she wonders if she should have had the requirements, and the reader, at this point, surely wonders if Esther herself couldn't do with a bit of reason.
