How we cite our quotes: (Name of Play, Act #)
Quote #4
BRANT: I felt there was something wrong the moment I saw her. I tried my damndest to put her off the course by giving her some softsoap--as you'd told me to do to blind her. That was a mistake, Christine. It made her pay too much attention to me--and opened her eyes!
CHRISTINE: Oh, I know I've made one blunder after another. It's as if love drove me on to do everything I shouldn't. I never should have brought you to this house. Seeing you in New York should have been enough for me. But I loved you too much. I wanted you every possible moment we could steal! And I simply couldn't believe that he ever would come home. I prayed that he should be killed in the war so intensely that I finally believed it would surely happen! Oh, if he were only dead! (Homecoming, Act 2)
Christine felt driven by a force outside her control that made her act foolishly. She thinks it might be love, but we know better. It's like the script was written for her and she had no choice but to follow it.
Quote #5
CHRISTINE: […] She is in a state of tense, exultant excitement. Then, as if an idea had suddenly come to her, she speaks to his retreating figure with a strange sinister air of elation. You'll never dare leave me now, Adam—for your ships or your sea or your naked Island girls—when I grow old and ugly. (Homecoming, Act 2)
Having roped him in to being her accomplice in murdering her husband, Christine seals Adam's fate to hers. He can't leave her now. This is almost the exact same threat that Orin makes to Lavinia in The Haunted about their mutual guilt after the murder of Brant. Orin uses it as an attempt to control his sister forever. The repetition of these similar events is one way that the playwright suggests that some tragic fate is being played out over and over.
Quote #6
MANNON: It isn't my heart. It's something uneasy troubling my mind—as if something in me was listening, watching, waiting for something to happen. (Homecoming, Act 4)
Whenever a character's feeling something mysterious that they can't quite put their finger on, you can bet that some hugely fated event is about to be played out. In this case, Ezra's about to be murdered. Just the next step in this predestined family drama.