Cold Sassy Tree: Chapters 30-31

Chapters 30-31 Summary
 
Will and Love begin to break in Miss Love’s horse, Mr. Beautiful. Will is impressed that Love knows how to break a horse in by stages. She is fearless. Love tells Will he doesn’t have to keep the secret about her kissing McAlister because she told Grandpa about it before anyone else could. Grandpa said that since the cowboy was on the train back to Texas, it didn’t matter now.
 
Love has no friends, and so she makes a friend of Will. They speak of the store trip to New York. There is an extra train ticket because his mother will not go with her husband, because of mourning. Will says Grandpa hates New York and will not go either.
 
When Will goes to apologize to Aunt Loma, he is surprised. She is not mad. She has heard the stories, and they laugh together. She thinks Will is clever and tells him to write his stories down. She gives him a journal to write in.
 
Chapters 30-31 Commentary
 
Loma recognizes Will’s talent because she once wanted to be a writer and actress. She gives him the journal she was going to write her own material in before she made her disastrous marriage.
 
This chapter gives us a different view of Loma. She has some generosity, but she is young and spoiled, only twenty, with a baby and a bad marriage. She gives Will an example of how stupid her husband Camp is. He painted the mantle but painted right over a cockroach and a pencil. Even Will says he does not like how Loma treats her husband like dirt.
 
Will is attracted to Love for her spirit and is also sexually attracted to her as he is blossoming into adolescence. Will is embedded in the point of view of Cold Sassy, though he is flexible, a person capable of growth. He takes in the unconventional opinions of Love and Grandpa without comment in his narrative, but it is implied that they were important to him as he was growing up. Love and Grandpa give alternatives to the narrow-minded ideas of the town.