have the perfect world her confidence implies. For example, Kitty has remained barren despite her desire to have children. On the other hand, the one thing Laura seems to be excelling at in the domestic sphere is producing progeny. As the two women sip coffee Kitty admits she has to go to the hospital for a few days and wants Laura to feed her pet dog. She tells Laura, somewhat evasively, that the problem is in her uterus, probably the cause of her infertility. Laura moves to comfort Kitty with an embrace. She feels a sense of what it would be like to be a man, and also a sort of jealousy towards Ray, Kitty's husband. Both women capitulate to the moment, to hold each other. Laura is kissing Kitty's forehead when Kitty lifts her face and the two women kiss each other on the lips. It is Kitty who pulls away and Laura is assailed by a panic. She feels she will be perceived as the predator in this astounding development, and indeed "Laura and Kitty agree, silently, that this is true." She also realizes her son, Richie, has been watching everything. However Kitty is already on her way out the door, her momentary lapse of character wiped from memory. Nothing is mentioned of the kiss, she brushes off Laura's continued overtures of help politely and leaves. Laura's world has been jolted. It is too much. It is like a Virginia Woolf novel, too full. Attempting to return to the world she knows, she attends to her son and, without hesitation, dumps her freshly made cake in the bin. She will make another cake, a better one. "Why she wonders, does it seem that she could give him anything, anything at all, and receive essentially the same response? What does he desire nothing, really, beyond what he's already got?...This, she reminds herself, is a virtue." —Laura ruminates on Dan's relentless contentedness, p. 100, 1999, 4th Estate paperback edition. "Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they've been given with good intentions because they exist because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets". pp. 100–101, 1999, 4th Estate paperback edition. "Why did she marry him? She married him out of love. She married him