the ultimate compliment: a hall that forgets to blink — "what a tragic adventure this is…"

The theme's model of perfect Identification, and its quiet moral floor. Total reception — a room that forgets to blink, Ewell and Gompert included, "looking not just at the speaker's face but into it" — is the reward for a truth told with no defenses left. And it comes with no judgment, because the recognition is that "it was basically the same all over, after all, Out There": her ruin differs from theirs only in degree. The closing note names the whole theme's stance toward its sufferers — not culpability but a "tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for," the Disease as something befallen, borne, and survived in common.