The storyteller leaves his mother bent over, listening at the parlor door, as he picks up the thread of parallel events in the kitchen — a digression. But this is more than just an author's trick of presenting simultaneous segments of his story; the implications are uniquely Tristram's: the character is flesh and blood, not just an author's dummy. He has left her for much longer than the scheduled five minutes, and she has a crick in her back from staying bent over. Tristram walks around in the Shandy world; like a stage director, he makes the characters stop and start, but they don't see him (since they're "characters" as well as people). The characters in this world are always vital, but it is a qualified vitality: they are dynamic and they are static — at the same time. These simultaneous conditions supply one of the basic tensions of the novel, a strange but somehow convincing dualism. The Shandys are allowed their independent movement and direction, but they are always subject to the laws of Tristram's consciousness of them. That consciousness, although it does not interfere with their character and their behavior, provides the sunlight by which we see them or the darkness that hides them from us.
Tristram had promised, among other things, a Chapter on Chambermaids and a Chapter on Buttonholes. He unites the two themes to suggest a bawdy interrelationship, and he offers this as an excuse for not writing about them: no bawdy in his book! The "chapter in lieu of it" — Chapter 7 — is bawdier, but only because of what he says about it in Chapter 8: it is a "chapter of chamber-maids, green-gowns, and old hats." Without a footnote, however, no one would even notice it.
With Trim's mention of the story of the "poor lieutenant" (Le Fever), the author prepares the reader for something he will take up forty chapters later (in Book 6, Chapter 6). Trim points out the parallel with something that only he knows about — Toby will "sigh in his bed for a whole month together" about Bobby's death, just as he did when "Le Fever" died. And that is all that Tristram wants to say about the matter here. The author knows what he wants where.
