Esther rejects Buddy's proposal and breaks off relations with him

Esther’s rejection of Buddy Willard’s proposal becomes a break not only with a suitor but with the future he assumes she will accept. She refuses marriage outright, then later answers his attempt to keep their connection open with a deliberately final letter; the exchange makes her decision an act of self-definition rather than a passing doubt.

The Proposal and Refusal

Buddy sits beside Esther, puts an arm around her waist, and brushes the hair from her ear before asking her to become Mrs. Buddy Willard. Esther does not move. The proposal might once have overwhelmed her: she thinks back to the five or six years when she adored Buddy from a distance. Now its conventional promise produces an impulse to laugh, and she tells him she needs to say something important.

Buddy assumes that Esther has met someone else. She corrects him: the issue is not a rival, but her own decision. She tells him she is never going to get married. When he calls her crazy and predicts that she will change her mind, she answers that her mind is made up. His cheerfulness persists, registering the gap between his expectation that her refusal is temporary and her insistence that it is final.

An Earlier Disagreement Recalled

Esther grounds her rejection in an earlier conversation after Skit Night, when Buddy hitchhiked back to college with her. She reminds him that she had wanted to live in the country and the city both, and that he laughed, calling her a true neurotic and identifying the question as one from a psychology-class questionnaire. In the present, she turns his old judgment back on herself: she says he was right that she was neurotic, because she could never settle in either place.

The recollection makes the disagreement more than a clash over where to live. Buddy had treated Esther’s incompatible wishes as a joke and a diagnosis; she now invokes that exchange while refusing the marital future he offers. Her words do not present an alternative settled life plan. Instead, they insist that uncertainty and divided desire cannot simply be corrected by marriage.

The Letter and the Break

The refusal is reinforced later, after Esther learns she has not been accepted for the summer writing course. She cancels her arrangements for summer school and opens Buddy’s letter. He writes that he is probably falling in love with a nurse who also has tuberculosis, but that his mother has rented a cottage in the Adirondacks for July. If Esther came along with his mother, Buddy says, he might discover that his feeling for the nurse was only infatuation.

Esther does not accept the invitation as a reconciliation. She crosses out Buddy’s message and writes on the reverse of the paper that she is engaged to a simultaneous interpreter, never wants to see Buddy again, and does not want her children to have a hypocrite for a father. The invented engagement gives her reply a sharp, ironic counterproposal, while its accusation connects her anger to the hypocrisy she associates with Buddy. She puts the letter back in its envelope, seals it with Scotch tape, and readdresses it to him without adding a stamp, judging the message worth three cents.

Significance

The episode unfolds across a face-to-face refusal and a later act of correspondence. In the first, Esther states her decision plainly but Buddy treats it as something she will outgrow. In the second, she controls the written reply, replaces his proposal with her own terms, and sends the message back to him. The contrast shows how a decision that Buddy does not acknowledge in conversation becomes harder to mistake when Esther makes it materially present in his returned letter.

Her rejection also sits beside a broader refusal to accept the future prescribed for her. After canceling summer school, Esther decides to spend the summer writing a novel, imagining that it would fix a lot of people. The novel is an aspiration, not an accomplished outcome, but the decision gives the break with Buddy a forward direction: rather than join his family’s summer plans while he evaluates another attachment, she turns toward work she has chosen for herself. The ending is not a romantic settlement. It is Esther’s explicit refusal of marriage to Buddy and her attempt to close their relationship on her own terms.