Why is Jem moody at the beginning of chapter 7? Is Scout able to understand by ''climbing into Jem's skin''? What does the rest of the chapter reveal...

At the
beginning of ,tells us that " stayed moody and silent for a week." That's a hint for
us to go backwards a little bit to find out what already happened to make Jem feel
moody. 

We saw back inthattold the kids to leavealone. But then in , Jem
tries to sneak into Boo's house. (He has to make a quick getaway, and he leaves his pants behind
when he gets caught on the fence.) He feels guilty about it, especially because his dad told him
not to do it--and his dad has never had to punish Jem physically (by "whipping" him or
giving him a "licking," as the kids call it). "We shouldna done that tonight,
Scout," he says.

Now it makes sense why Jem is "moody and
silent:" he feels sad and guilty for disobeying
Atticus.

Scout tries to see things from Jem's point of view
("climbing inside his skin") by imagining how she would feel if she had been the one
trying to sneak into Boo's house: "if I had gone alone to the Radley Place at two in the
morning, my funeral would have been held the next afternoon," she says. But she mostly just
leaves Jem alone; she doesn't understand him any better by trying to step into his
shoes.

Later in the chapter, we find out that when Jem went
back to get his pants, they weren't exactly where he left them. They had been folded neatly--and
the hole in them had been sewn up! That reveals that Boo actually helped Jem: didn't want to
creep him out, didn't want to get him in trouble, and actually wanted to help him keep the
secret by fixing the pants. What a change--Jem had thought that Boo was a creepy bad guy, but
then he learned otherwise because of the pants. Because Jem realizes that he had
misjudged Boo and treated him badly when Boo had been kind to Jem, now we understand even more
why Jem is so moody.