Sadie reports on her gradual integration at Le Moulin after the first week. While the Moulinards have not divulged any sabotage plans, she has built trust with Pascal and the male intellectuals in the library, where she is permitted mild dissent as part of cultivating an authentic persona. She often skips the communal lunches, citing American workaholism, and instead lies beneath a walnut tree contemplating Bruno's ideas about nature's hallucinatory effects.

Sadie observes the gendered dynamics of the commune. Florence, who still maintains contact with the ostracized Nadia Derain, brings coffee to the library and was burdened over the summer with caring for Pascal's two visiting children, whom Pascal himself largely ignored. Sadie notes she occupies an honorary-male status due to her connection to Pascal, her academic background, and her American identity, which the theorists treat as exotic expertise on social savagery.

A library debate centers on Pascal's summary of Melva Blumberg's 1970s treatise proposing state-managed robotic housework crews to relieve women of double duty. Jérôme and Alexandre object to state intrusion; Pascal passionately rebuts them, insisting Blumberg envisioned a post-private-property world where the state would not be coercive. Sadie observes Pascal seemingly self-seduced by his own rhetoric.

The chapter closes with Sadie reflecting on the Moulinard maxim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. She privately doubts capitalism will end before the planet does, and recalls Bruno's claim that the only option is to leave our world—to abandon a way of inhabiting reality. She begins to find this idea less hopeless, suggesting that acknowledging permanence may be the first step toward escape.