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“George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, then.”

“I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.” 

“What would a psychologist want with a nursery?”

“You know very well what he’d want.” His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four. 

“It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was.”

“All right, let’s have a look.”

This early exchange between George and Lydia reveals George to be disinterested, lazy, and slow on the uptake. As seen later in the story, George knows full well why a psychologist needs to see the nursery, but he either doesn’t immediately understand or pretends not to understand in order to avoid having to rise to meet and solve a potential problem. George’s pattern of assuming everything will be fine, even when something is clearly wrong, is repeated time and again throughout the story. As seen in this quote, George frequently submits to action only when it is already too late.

“It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?”

“No, it would be horrid. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.” 

“That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.”

“I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?”

“All right, go play in Africa.”

This conversation between George and Peter shows not only that George doesn’t understand his own son, and the danger he is in, but also that he is no match for the difficulties ahead. The disinterested George has allowed his son to become so spoiled that the boy doesn’t want to learn to do anything by himself. Even more alarming is the ease with which George gives in and lets Peter go play in the nursery. He is so lazy that he cannot even muster the energy required to discipline his young son. Instead, he insensibly encourages Peter to engage in the behavior he is supposedly trying to battle against, and he thereby contributes to the peril that threatens his family rather than protecting them from it.

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