The ménage of a professor whose wife is nothing but a _Hausfrau_ is dull beyond endurance for all concerned. A woman physician and her husband appear happy, but the man privately mourns his wife’s sacrifice of maternity to her professional career. Catherine’s younger sister, a social worker and unmarried, has broken away from her mother because “I can’t be babied all my life—all sorts of infantile traits sticking to me,” and is living with an older fellow-worker. When her sister advises marriage, she retorts: Husband! Me? I’m fixed for life right now.... Anybody needs someone loving ’em, smoothing ’em down, setting ’em up, brushing off the dust ... I know a little thing or two about love. But [this way] you can do that ... through and around whatever else you’re doing ... I know lots of women who prefer to set up an establishment with another woman. Then you go fifty-fifty on everything. Work and feeling and all the rest, and no King waiting around for his humble servant.[44] This is Miss Hull’s nearest allusion to physical intimacy, and while not explicitly implied, neither is it repudiated. Sympathetically as the variant pair are portrayed, they are no more romanticized than the heterosexual couples. The older woman has been a fanatic in many causes and a hunger-striker for suffrage, is moody and violent, and quarrels with any critical male at sight. The younger is cool, practical, and a bit hard. But the alliance apparently stands as good a chance of survival as any in the book, and the author accepts it as a matter of course. The only dissenting voice is the professor’s; he is bitter in his animosity and contempt.