Affection
The story reveals eternally unresolved questions of love and affection. Love is a wizardry that can give either wings to fly or bereave a desire to live. It is making people blind and deaf, heedless and headless. Happy love creates big families, new lives, and big future. Otherwise unrequited love drains the spirit, wrecks one’s hopes and generates hate, crushes people, depending on how strong the person is. One should always be careful with the feeling that opens the soul. And the story is a good example of it. We can observe how Miss Amelia changed when she fall in love with cousin Lymon. She became more generous and calm, a woman of a good temper. But later she felt a cost of love when she lost everything to it. the story does not open the very theme of love, which is rather wide in its sense, but the theme of how love can make people blind, how they become inattentive and can make things that may bring them undesired results. One always should be on guard when falling in love.
Reliance
Trust as a glass, once broken, will never be completed again. Trust opens new features in a person as it shows whether a person can be relied on or not. But unfortunately this knowledge comes only when it results in reliability or betrayal. This story instructs of the results when trust is broken, as well as one’s life after betrayal is broken. Because the closer one becomes to a person the more he is opening. Miss Amelia trusted the hunchback devotedly, and even let him into her business, and he helped her to improve it. But then he changed the person of his admiration to Marvin Macy and broke the relationship and trust of his beloved Amelia. This is something intimate that should never come public. Trust means relationship of souls, and the moment it is broken two souls become wounded.
Admiration
Looking from the positive side, if the admiration has limits this is some example of imitation to obtain the desired heights and become look like a person you admire. But what is too much that is unwell. If admiration is going way far it can cause harm. Praise should have a measurement otherwise an individual becomes a slave and a hostage of situation. The narrator emphasizes how many lives can be ruined just because of one person admiring another with no limits.
