“And now, here we were, all grown up, and she still carried this hurt, which seeing me again, and seeing that I had lost none of my callousness, she said, had renewed and had brought back to her a distress comparable in intensity to what she had suffered in those weeks, only this time, she said, she had tried, for reasons unclear even to her, to keep her pain hidden and put a happy face on the situation. She had tried to forgive, she said, and to forget, but neither had worked.”

This quote about the pain from the past that Moji tried to put behind impacted me because it seemed like she wants to put what she suffered to rest because it is easier than accepting the fact that she felt violated. She may may not have wanted to acknowledge what had happened to her because she did not want this experience to define her in society. She did not want to ruin the friendship between Julius and her brother because she knew how much it meant to her brother and she may have worried about the future that she would have ruined for Julius despite his priviledgedness. This scandal would have ruined him and she may have thought that she could have just brushed it off. In society, women are seen as they were at fault for these kinds of situations because their behavior is provoking or the way the way they dress is an open invitation to be disrespected.