Lulu sighed. “Yes, Mom, I got your message about Professor Hamilton,” she said. “Are you ever going to get my message that I don’t want to spend my life locked away behind a test tube like a half-blind, obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ridden lab rat?”

“Well, sweetie, I can’t think you want to spend your life looking after the office files in a secondhand shop, either, do you?”

“It’s not a secondhand shop,” said Lulu. “It’s an arts and antique-goods importership, and believe it or not, I’m quite happy there. It’s close to the flat, Mr. Goncharoff is really sweet to work for, and he never minds it if I …”

Too late, she stopped.

“If you kind of, sort of don’t get around to coming in to work when you don’t feel like it,” her mother concluded. “Oh, Lulu, what are we going to do with you?”

“I’m not asking you to do anything with me,” said Lulu. “I’m a grown woman, I’m not expecting you to give me money, and what I do with my life is up to me to decide when I decide to decide it, not anyone else.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Emma. “Just flitting around jobs like that. There are women who’d kill for a brain like yours.”

“Well, it wouldn’t do them much good on Death Row, would it?” And that was enough, Lulu decided, of discussion of her professional prospects. “Anyway, Mom, I don’t know that you’re in a position to lecture me here. When you were my age, you were living in a women’s collective outside Boston, reading Gloria Steinem, and ritually burning your bra every Saturday night.”

Lulu was tactless but not artless: the topic of burning bras was one that Fee was rarely able to resist.

“We never burned them,” she said now, firmly. “That was an outright lie put about by the male establishment, who were so terrified of us it was pitiful. We just gave ourselves permission not to torture ourselves by squeezing into those terrible corsets and girdles the way our poor mothers had, and we were much happier for it, which drove them crazy.”

“You lived in a collective?” said Charlie. “What was it like?”

“It was mad,” said Lulu. “They raised chickens and lived on eggs and earwiggy apples, and went out every weekend in gangs beating the bushes for male chauvinist piggery, wearing dungarees and huge round badges that said things like ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’ And then they were surprised when men didn’t like them.”

“It was wonderful,” said Fee. “We were young and idealistic, and, yes, Lulu’s right, we took ourselves far too seriously. But we didn’t have the luxury of making jokes about equality back then. We had a task to do, and by God we worked at it, and by God we opened the world up for the next generation of women. You girls wouldn’t have anything like the lives you have now if it hadn’t been for us. Have you had some couscous, Charlie? It’s quite good.”