.:MrS. DuboSE:.

Write a paragraph about Mrs Dubose. When writing, try to remember Atticus' words about getting into someone's skin. Try to understand Mrs Dubose, and why she behaves the way she does.

When you first read about Mrs. Dubose and don't think about Atticus' advice to his children, she strikes you as a very outspoken and rude old lady, who likes nothing more than to know that she has "set someone straight". She is always having a go at Jem and Scout and they are, with no fault of their own, terrified of her! She picks on Scout for "not presenting herself like a proper lady" and Jem for anything she can get her hands on; the most hurtful being "Your daddy's a nigger-lover."

But when you start to get to know about Mrs. Dubose a little better and use Atticus' advice, you realise that she's really a very sick old lady that is undergoing a lot of pain and difficuty. She is addicted to morphine and, being a very independant women, doesn't like being relient on something so civil. So she makes a promise that before she dies that she was going to "leave the world beholden to nothing and nobody."

And so she starts making this brave quest to get off her addiction.

When Jem makes the fatal mistake by retaliating to one of the remarks she shoots at him when he passes one day, he is "punished" to go and read to Mrs. Dubose for a month. Scout tags along with him.

All the while that Jem and Scout were reading to Mrs. Dubose, they saw a lot of the pain and the fits that she went through on her road to recovery; but they didn't understand what was going on.

What the children didn't know, and what Jem didn't find out until she passed away, was that she was a perfectly alright women, who had just been suffering a great ordeal.

Mrs. Dubose kept her promise to the beholden to nothing and no one, and the children didn't see how much of a help they really were. I feel really sorry for Mrs. Dubose and what she must have been suffering through, and I believe that if she had gotten through her ordeal and not passed away so soon, others would have been able to realise that as well.