Eveline's brief story recounts possibly the most critical point in her life. A moment of activity and possibility in her dull existence that she met with complete inactivity. Her passive nature is introduced in the first paragraph whose structure is mirrored later in the short story when she is presented as a "deer in headlights" when confronted with the decision to stay. Ultimately, through her failure to act, Eveline loses the chance to leave a life that she oddly describes, saying, "It was hard work - a hard life - but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life," (220). Her words express a past life explored through a few flashbacks of her father in favorable moods, and most strong, her mother's death. Connected somehow to these familiar, safe memories, she finds it overwhelming actually leaving the comfort of her present state of life. Even in the promise of something better, she cannot let go of the madness that she knows.
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