Chap­ter XXIV opens with Denis enter­ing a qui­et draw­ing room and com­ing across Jenny’s red sketchbook—an unas­sum­ing object that quick­ly becomes a mir­ror he’s unpre­pared to face. Curios­i­ty leads him to flip through its pages, despite an ear­li­er hint that its con­tents are not meant for his eyes. Inside, Jen­ny has ren­dered every­one at Crome in bru­tal­ly hon­est car­i­ca­tures, each accom­pa­nied by point­ed cap­tions. The humor is sharp, but what stings most is the accu­ra­cy. For Denis, her draw­ing reduces his self-image to a parody—an awk­ward man with intel­lec­tu­al airs, marked by self-con­scious envy and social hes­i­ta­tions. The dis­cov­ery is jar­ring. He real­izes he isn’t the qui­et observ­er he believed him­self to be, but rather a fig­ure observed, dis­sect­ed, and even mocked. This over­turns his belief in the pri­va­cy of his inner world. He has been seen clear­ly, and not kind­ly, by some­one he nev­er expect­ed to judge him so deeply.

The impact of this rev­e­la­tion lingers as Denis steps out­side. Wan­der­ing the gar­den, his eyes catch the idle strut of a pea­cock, bril­liant yet fool­ish in its exag­ger­at­ed dis­play. He sees in the bird a ver­sion of himself—decorative, try­ing to impress, but ulti­mate­ly absurd. Under the shade of an ilex tree, he grap­ples with the dis­com­fort of this new self-aware­ness. The real­iza­tion that oth­ers per­ceive him dif­fer­ent­ly from how he views him­self becomes hard to shake. It’s not just embarrassment—it’s a kind of iden­ti­ty cri­sis. For the first time, Denis tru­ly under­stands that oth­er people’s per­spec­tives hold weight, and that his place in the world is shaped not only by thought, but by action—or lack there­of. The idea that his clev­er­ness is not enough and that his pos­tur­ing has not gone unno­ticed leaves him unsteady.

Soon after, he finds Mary sit­ting beneath a stat­ue of Venus, look­ing as vul­ner­a­ble as he feels. Their con­ver­sa­tion begins gen­tly, root­ed in shared expe­ri­ences of rejec­tion and dis­com­fort. Mary, still affect­ed by Ivor’s sud­den depar­ture and a post­card that closed that chap­ter with polite cru­el­ty, speaks can­did­ly. She dis­cuss­es love not as romance, but as a series of moments where expec­ta­tion col­lides with real­i­ty. Denis lis­tens, still smart­ing from Jenny’s draw­ing, and finds com­fort in Mary’s hon­esty. There is no per­for­mance in her words, only the raw­ness of expe­ri­ence. They talk of lone­li­ness, of mis­un­der­stand­ing, and of the fear of show­ing too much. These reflec­tions blur the line between per­son­al pain and philo­soph­i­cal inquiry. Togeth­er, they hov­er in that strange space where inti­ma­cy and dis­tance coex­ist.

But as always in Crome, per­son­al moments are not left to unfold nat­u­ral­ly. The gong rings, a sig­nal that din­ner awaits and that reflec­tion must be paused. The spell between Denis and Mary breaks, and real­i­ty asserts itself once more. They rise from the grass, return­ing to the house and its rou­tines, as if noth­ing had been said. Yet some­thing has shift­ed. Denis car­ries with him the echo of Jenny’s image and the weight of Mary’s qui­et suf­fer­ing. The day has left a mark—not in tri­umph or clar­i­ty, but in a deep­er sense of humil­i­ty. He can­not unsee what was drawn, nor can he dis­miss what was said. These encoun­ters leave him more ground­ed, less shield­ed by ideas, and more aware of the del­i­cate absur­di­ty that sur­rounds all human con­nec­tion.

This chap­ter does­n’t offer res­o­lu­tion, but rather an open­ing. Denis begins to under­stand that self-per­cep­tion must coex­ist with how oth­ers see us, and that nei­ther can stand alone. He learns, through dis­com­fort, that art—whether Jenny’s sketch­es or his own half-writ­ten poems—can reveal more than it intends. His dia­logue with Mary rein­forces that love and loss are not dra­mat­ic cli­max­es but qui­et shifts, often revealed in awk­ward silences and unspo­ken ques­tions. Crome Yel­low con­tin­ues to paint its world in contrasts—sharp satire and soft emo­tion, com­e­dy and sincerity—and this chap­ter lies at their inter­sec­tion. Denis may not know yet how to act dif­fer­ent­ly, but for the first time, he clear­ly sees that some­thing must change.