and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port." p. 97, 1999, 4th Estate paperback edition. "It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book...What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other." p. 98, 1999, 4th Estate paperback edition. Mrs. Brown Laura's cake is complete but she is not happy. It is less than she had hoped it would be. She had invested great and desperate hopes in the cake, like an artist working on a great piece of art, and in her mind, she failed. Laura catalogs what she will do to keep busy for the rest of the day: prepare for Dan's party. She knows Dan will be happy with whatever she prepares. This slightly annoys her. She realizes her husband's happiness "depends only on the fact of her, here in the house, living her life, thinking of him". She tries to tell herself this is a good thing and that she is being difficult but is suddenly hit by the image of Virginia Woolf putting a stone into the pocket of her coat and walking into a river. This psychic connection to another ‘desperate housewife’ is interrupted by a tap on the back door. It is Kitty, Laura's neighbor. Laura is panicked and excited. She wants to see Kitty but she is unprepared, looking too much, she believes, like "the woman of sorrows". Kitty is invited in. She fits effortlessly and confidently into this post-war world of domestication, she seems to have it all. She notices Laura's amateur efforts at making a cake, just what Laura was dreading. Laura recognizes her inability to fit into this domestic world, but also her inability not to care – she is trapped between two worlds. She also recognizes, however, that Kitty does not