Great idea for a thread! That's a very interesting observation on that quote about crying. I'm glad that Lewis made a point of saying that Eustace was crying like a man in The Silver Chair.

I haven't read The Great Divorce yet, but I ran across this quote on the internet, and it reminded me so much of the Dwarfs in the stable in The Last Battle.

A damned soul is nearly nothing; it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.

So very sad. No wonder Lucy cried for them.

“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”

From a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III:

Yes, I too think there is lots to be said for being no longer young: and I do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex. It’s natural enough in our species, as in others, that the young birds should show off their plumage—in the mating season. But the trouble in the modern world is that there’s a tendency to rush all the birds on to that age as soon as possible and then keep them there as late as possible, thus losing all the real value of the other parts of life in a senseless, pitiful attempt to prolong what, after all, is neither its wisest, its happiest, or most innocent period. I suspect merely commercial motives are behind it all: for it is at the showing-off age that birds of both sexes have least sales resistance!

That definitely explains the idea behind Susan turning out as she did. Lewis believed that society tended to push people that way. I think there likely are commercial motivations behind it.