If D loves H, then where does this prickliness — this obstinacy verging on imperviousness — come from? Watching her swing between secluding herself from H — physically, verbally — and clinging to him, I think of the painter Celia Paul, who became Lucien Freud’s lover in 1978 after meeting him at the Slade School of Art, when he was 55 and her teacher and she an 18-year-old student, and who has described young women in such circumstances as facing a “dilemma.” These women have “their own ambition for their art, and their need to be loved and desired. The two ambitions are usually incompatible.” This incompatibility has many causes, among them the duty that arises out of love, which, Paul testifies, makes it difficult to remain “dedicated to my art in an undivided way. I think that generally men find it much easier to be selfish. And you do need to be selfish.” I think of Alice Munro, who admitted to interviewers dispatched by the Paris Review that, while all young artists needed to be somewhat “hard hearted,” “it’s worse if you’re a woman. . . . When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other.”