suddenly changes. No longer is she making strange whimpering noises; she now appears perfectly calm all of a sudden. To everyone watching, it seems that Rebecca's very presence is responsible for this remarkable change.

Rebecca's explanation for Betty's behavior is that the girl was up to mischief. As the mother of eleven children, and as the grandmother of twenty-six, Rebecca has vast experience of dealing with all the various tricks that youngsters are apt to get up to. She's convinced that the other girls, like Betty, will soon get bored of their little game and wake up. So there's really nothing for any of their parents to worry about.

Some of the basic explanations are obvious, whether it is witchcraft, or some kind of unbalanced mind on her part due to her being an orphan or some other deficit which she suffers because she does not have parents to raise her.  In Act II, scene 4, Proctor's explanation is just that she is crazy, in particular that “the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

He later goes on, for example in Act III, scene 3 to play along with the judge and other's opinion that her weakness or madness is the fault of her un-Christian behavior and that she is deserving of a curse or some kind of bad luck due to the fact that she laughs during prayer or dances naked at night, etc.