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Chapter 14
“Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lighting, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies.”
This Chapter 14 quote expands upon Dill’s character. He’s intelligent—reading and math come easily to him—but he also possesses a rich fantasy life, likely a result of the neglect he suffers from his mother and stepfather. Dill is lonely and prefers daydreams to reality, as evidenced by his preoccupation with Boo and his knack for storytelling.
Chapter 15
“Atticus tried to stifle a smile but didn’t make it. ‘No, we don’t have mobs and that nonsense in Maycomb. I’ve never heard of a gang in Maycomb.’”
In Chapter 15, Scout and Jem become uneasy when a group of men including the sheriff come to the Finches’ home to discuss their uneasiness about the coming trial with Atticus. When Jem asks Atticus if they were a mob, Atticus says there’s no such thing in Maycomb—foreshadowing the mob that confronts him at the jail later on in the chapter.
“‘H-ey, Atticus!’ I thought he would have a fine surprise, but his face killed my joy. A flash of plain fear was going out of his eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.”
Scout, as a child, doesn’t recognize the danger Atticus is facing when she runs into the middle of the mob that has surrounded him outside Tom Robinson’s jail cell in Chapter 15. When she sees the look on his face, she realizes she miscalculated. These men are strangers, not the friends and neighbors Atticus spoke with the other night. She may not know enough to feel fear rather than embarrassment, but Atticus certainly does, as evidenced by his desperate attempts to get Jem to take her and Dill home.
“‘Well, Atticus, I was just sayin’ to Mr. Cunningham that entailments are bad an’ all that, but you said not to worry, it take a long time sometimes… that you all’d ride it out together…’ I was slowly drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed. Entailments seemed all right enough for livingroom talk.”
Further in Chapter 15, Scout seeks out a familiar face while Atticus faces down the mob and lands on Mr. Cunningham, the father of her classmate Walter. To quell the tension, she casts her mind around for a conversation topic and lands upon his entailment, a legal “vexation” Atticus has been helping him with. By connecting with him, Scout inadvertently forces Mr. Cunningham to feel shame, thus causing the mob to disperse.
