“Well, that sounds grown-up, Mom,” said Lulu. “Does it have three bears who lived in the wood?”

“No.” Fee smiled a little, and then sighed again. “It doesn’t have three bears who lived in the wood. It has a very, very nice and kindhearted young man who lived in London, who fell in love with a girl who lived in Boston. And the girl in Boston was living in times that were particularly interesting for women, when everything was changing, and all sorts of opportunities were opening up for her that just hadn’t been there for her grandmother or even for her mother, and, she being an independent sort of a girl, she just loved it. This independence was so exciting for her that for a long time she thought she’d never even get married, but the young man who was in love with her was so kind and so attentive to her that she found herself falling in love with him, too, so she married him and followed him to London, and found—after a few hiccups and a couple of false starts—that she was able to be just as independent there as she had been back in Boston, and they were very happy together.

“And pretty soon they had babies—three gorgeous, beautiful, adorable little daughters—and rather to her surprise, the independent young woman, who hadn’t thought she was much of a maternal sort at all, found she just loved taking care of them. She particularly loved talking to them, teaching them, helping them with their problems. She discovered she loved helping people with problems in general, in fact, and as soon as the little girls were old enough to look after themselves a bit, she qualified as a family therapist so that she could carry on helping people with problems, even people she didn’t know. And meanwhile, the girls were growing up into the wonderful new world for women that the young woman from Boston had helped to create, and the young woman was helping them to grow, and over the years the three girls just blossomed into the most amazing, strong, independent, self-reliant young women you could ever hope to meet, and the woman from Boston, who was middle-aged by this time, thought that life just couldn’t get any better.”

Fee stopped for a moment, and smiled wryly.

“What the woman from Boston had forgotten,” she continued after a moment, “was that the man from London liked to take care of people, too. He’d been very active in winning her heart during their courtship, and when she first arrived in London, she’d needed all sorts of help and guidance to find her way around and figure out the new life. When the babies were small, he’d been a wonderful father, pitching in with the cooking, the cleaning, the nappy changing, and when the woman been studying round the clock for her therapist exams, he’d fixed family meals, run her baths, done all sorts of kind and thoughtful things to make her life easier. But gradually, all that changed. The girls grew up into those beautifully strong and independent young women, who loved him, certainly, and who he was proud as Punch of, but they no longer needed him as they once had. The woman, who had been so anxious to preserve her own independence, had taken very great pains to make her own life, forge her own career, have her own concerns. No one, it seemed, needed the man anymore.