sibling rivalry between Marie-Therese and her brother; I do not expect a solution, a working-out and a happy everafter. I won't find it. The process of adjustment and compromise between the two is for life: the struggle will always be there; it is up to each of us to live with it, and to take the bitterness out of it.

We like to say that the girl within represents a conception of femininity, the display of affection and gentleness, the taste for the decorative and the beautiful which the male is denied: and this is true, but it is not the whole truth; the girl can be a bitch too, and if her brother really loses all discipline over her, I see nothing but trouble. And this is perhaps the hardest moment of all. We go through the hell of being born, the arrested development due to the missing girlhood, and finally arrive exhausted at a kind of recognition and acceptance. Is the struggle over? It is not. The price of safety is eternal vigilance, here as elsewhere. But why have safety? Because very few of us do not have a network of relationships to which we owe an obligation which we can only discharge through the effective functioning of the often disliked and occasionally hated brother. This twin relationship inevitably contains a love-hate element; there are ways in which the two can damage each other. Marie-Therese is now accepted by her brother and loved by him; he could not imagine or desire life without her. She has been an expensive luxury, and now she is an expen- sive necessity. Not just that through an unlucky choice on the part of her brother she led to a divorce and to the loss of a beloved child and a carefully created home; but in the more general way that her presence has meant a constant diversion of her brother's energies. He has been relati- vely successful in his professional life, many would say very successful; but in himself he knows that he has not realised the professional potential he possessed and this is because he has not been sufficiently single- minded in its pursuit. Others have caught up with him, are perhaps even now overtaking him; and he is philosophical about this. He does not have the public success he could have attained, but only occasionally does he feel any urge to cry into his beer; he has Marie-Therese, and loves her, and would not have it different. But he recognizes that she is not simply a hobby, and that she cannot, like the stamps or the chessmen or the print catalogues, be put away in the closet till next time. When she is once out of the closet psychologically, there is no putting her back: innocence is non-recoverable.

That the bitch aspect of the girl within is demanding I take to be axiomatic. For those who are married a new problem arises here. Once she has done battle with her brother, she turns her attention to the GG. Outwardly all smiles and reassurances, all sweetness and as much light as she can muster, she will fight every inch of territory over recognition

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