It wasn’t jealousy she felt; it was rage. And not because she couldn’t shop like that or dress like that but because that was what girls were supposed to be like . . . beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained . . . to be fallen in love with. Then she’d become a mother and be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.

This quote, appearing early in the story after Grace watches the movie Father of the Bride, sets up Grace’s main issue with the path that dating Maury represents. Grace is aware of and enraged by the roles she is expected to play as a woman because she knows they do not fit her personality. The idea of sacrificing her intellect and personal freedom in order to become a mindless wife and a devoted mother fills her with dread that she struggles to articulate. The narrative never reveals if Grace goes on to marry or have children because it is immaterial to the internal conflict these unrealistic expectations cause Grace to experience as a young woman. Grace’s frustration reveals her desire to experience life on her own terms and to learn as much as possible. The expectations outlined by the movie are limitations on those goals and Grace refuses to take part in them.

Grace was delighted by the idea of such travels—rather more than she was by the idea of what he spoke of, with a severe pride, as “our own home.” None of this seemed at all real to her, but then the idea of helping her uncle . . . and in the very house where she had grown up, had never seemed real, either.

At the midway point in the story Grace begins to realize she does not have a clear picture of what she wants her future to be. Grace is a person in love with ideas and possibilities, especially those that could expand her horizons. She is only just now living on her own, dealing with the guilt of realizing her great-uncle’s business isn’t the future she wants, and trying to figure out what she desires in a romantic relationship. Her ideas guide what she feels is “real” in the world. Everything that she does with Maury follows the script of her expectations for what dating should look like, and she struggles with internal strife when she is not satisfied or fulfilled by the experience. The more she interacts with the Traverses, tracing what delights her and what she has no interest in, the more she discovers where her priorities lie and what she can live with pursuing.