What was needed in that kitchen was a combination of Maiguru’s detachment and Lucia’s direction. Everybody needed to broaden out a little, to stop and consider the alternatives, but the matter was too intimate. It stung too saltily, too sharply and agonisingly the sensitive images that the women had of themselves,images that were really no more than reflections. But the women had been taught to recognise these reflections as self and it was frightening now to even begin to think that, the very facts which set them apart as a group, as women, as a certain kind of person, were only myths; frightening to acknowledge that generations of threat and assault and neglect had battered these myths into the extreme, dividing reality they faced, of the Maigurus or the Lucias.So instead of a broadening from both positions, instead of an encompassing expansion and a growth, the fear made it necessary to tighten up. Each retreated more resolutely into their roles, pretending while they did that actually they were advancing, had in fact initiated an offensive, when really, for each one of them, it was a last solitary, hopeless defence of the security of their illusions.