Her progress was not, of course, as smooth as this précis might indicate, nor was it unaccompanied by grinding hard work. It was interrupted by marriage, pregnancies, small children, and, to her astonishment, Stuart’s opposition. She and Stuart married when she started expecting their first child, Mark; Stuart had just left art school and intended to be a painter, which was all very well,while Kate was earning, but not so good when she gave up her job to have Mark. Neither of them objected much to poverty, but Kate found that she objected surprisingly strongly to the suspension of her own income, and at that stage she wasn’t nearly well enough established to work free-lance, though she tried. And she found that she equally strongly disliked Stuart’s ideas of survival. Stuart was a borrower. He borrowed money, from anyone who would lend it, and didn’t worry about paying it back. Kate tried to see in this an attractive, happy-go-lucky Armstrong trait, but failed. She was surprised by Stuart, and in more ways than one. Their sexual relations, which had seemed so satisfactory during courtship, became less and less so. Stuart was an emotional, impressionable fellow, good at talk and kisses and caresses, but not good at much else. During their early days, he used to amuse and impress Kate by telling her that he could make himself come just by looking at her, a facility which she took as a tribute to the power of love. It gradually dawned on her that this facility had its accompanying disadvantages. Frustrated, dissatisfied, she nursed the baby in the damp basement flat, turning to him more and more for affection, pondering Stuart’s defects—was it, after all, significant that she had met Stuart at Hunt’s, in a predominately homosexual milieu? Stuart’s looks appealed to men and women alike—was he, after all, basically a homosexual? Kate had nothing against homosexuals, on the contrary she liked them rather suspiciously much (and was heard to say only the other day in mock despair, “Not only are some of my best friends gay, all of them are”)—but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be married to one. Did the fact that she’d married a man like Stuart mean that she was frigid (Lesbian, even?), and if so, why hadn’t she thought about it earlier?