the Steeply–Poutrincourt colloquy: the susceptible will
This emotional susceptibility in terms of forgetting being more commonly a female thing. Schtitt and I think it’s a will issue. Susceptible wills are more common to the top girls here.
Context
deLint locates Hal's flaw on a spectrum E.T.A. reads as will. The forgetting, the drifting-off, the set-long lapses — "Schtitt and I think it's a will issue," and "susceptible wills are more common to the top girls here." Whatever its truth, it shows how the institution diagnoses the body's mental failures: not as psychology but as a defect of will, a hardness the regimen is supposed to install and that Hal, uniquely among the boys, conspicuously lacks.