Natalie Glass

Natalie Glass, addressed as Miss Glass, is an assistant librarian who enters Christine Penmark’s story through a conversation about a proposed novel. Christine describes her own predicament as fiction, and Natalie responds first as an interested reader and then as a participant in imagining its conclusion. Her questions draw out the story’s concealed family circumstances; her later account of a literary group’s unanimous vote turns the problem of an ending into a judgment that Christine must confront again.

Identity and Introduction

Natalie works as an assistant librarian. The narrative introduces her over lunch in the library garden, where she sits across from Christine at a rustic table beneath the pergola. The description notes a conspicuous claret-colored mark on her cheek, which she makes no effort to hide and treats with contempt. That detail establishes her as someone who does not accommodate the expected response of embarrassment, though the text does not develop it into a broader account of her life or character.

She opens the conversation by introducing herself and asking about Christine’s book. She knows that it is intended to be Christine’s first and wants to know whether the writing has begun or whether Christine is still researching. Christine replies that the idea is still taking shape and may come to nothing. Natalie’s curiosity is direct but practical: she asks what the book is about, making the library garden a place where Christine’s private situation can be rehearsed as a literary premise.

Questions That Expose the Story

Christine outlines the plot of her predicament, as she had previously done with Reginald Tasker. Natalie listens while eating her sandwich, nods, and catches crumbs in her palm. She initially treats the material as a writing problem, suggesting that Christine could soften it in the telling. But her follow-up questions move beyond tone: she asks whether the child’s father knows about his wife’s ancestry and whether he suspects the child as well.

Those questions bring the family’s unequal knowledge into focus. Christine explains that the father knows nothing of his wife’s background, which the wife herself discovered only well after the marriage. He recognizes that the child is unusual, Christine says, but does not know enough to become alarmed. Natalie has not uncovered these facts independently; Christine tells them to her. Her importance in the exchange lies in asking questions that make the concealed history and the father’s limited awareness explicit within the supposed novel.

Natalie then asks how Christine intends to end the book. Christine sees no happy ending, and Natalie agrees that the arrangement she has heard does not admit one. After pausing and looking toward the library as if briefly distracted, she proposes a severe resolution: the mother should shoot the child before the child grows up and begins harming the neighbors. Christine reacts with immediate alarm. Natalie appears surprised by the strength of that response and maintains that she sees no other solution to the mother’s predicament. The exchange places a fictional suggestion beside Christine’s actual crisis without making them identical: Natalie speaks in terms of a novel, while Christine’s vehemence exposes how close the material is to her life.

The Literary Group’s Verdict

Later, as Christine returns old papers to their custodian and prepares to leave, Natalie comes into the room and asks whether she has decided on the ending. Natalie then confesses that she has repeated Christine’s plot to other people. She explains that she lives with her sister, who shares her strong literary interests, and that the two belong to a small group that meets weekly to discuss trends in writing. At its most recent meeting, Natalie presented Christine’s situation as an example relevant to a point raised by the group.

Natalie acknowledges that repeating the plot was indiscreet, particularly because writers guard their plots, but adds that Christine had not explicitly described the conversation as confidential. Her apology is therefore accompanied by a defense of her own judgment: she admits the breach while limiting the obligation she believes she had to keep the story private. The disclosure also shows that the ending had moved beyond the garden conversation. Natalie had carried the problem into a circle of readers, making Christine’s predicament the subject of a collective discussion.

The group considered psychiatric treatment, reform school, and faith in the future before taking a vote. Its members unanimously settled on an ending in which the mother keeps her secret, kills the child, and then dies by suicide. Natalie describes their discussion as resembling a jury weighing an actual case. That comparison underscores the shift from literary speculation to moral adjudication: the group treats possible endings as alternatives to assess, then delivers a verdict. Christine replies that the solution had occurred to her too and might be the one she would have to use. Natalie does not dictate Christine’s choice, but her report gives the imagined ending the force of a public consensus.

Narrative Role

Natalie’s role is limited in duration but consequential in structure. She is neither a confidante established through a sustained personal relationship nor an authority on Christine’s family history. Instead, she serves as an attentive listener whose questions help Christine articulate what the father knows, what he does not know, and what kind of ending the story might permit. Her initial proposal makes the mother’s lethal intervention thinkable within the literary conversation; the group’s later vote repeats and extends that proposal.

The sequence also creates an uneasy boundary between life and fiction. Christine presents her predicament as a book, Natalie responds according to the conventions of literary discussion, and the group evaluates possible endings as if deciding a case. Yet Christine’s swift objection and later acknowledgment that the proposed conclusion has occurred to her make clear that the discussion cannot remain safely abstract. Natalie’s indiscretion carries the story outward to other readers, while their unanimous answer returns it to Christine as both a narrative possibility and a judgment on the crisis she has described.