Both of the characters have had difficult times in their lives, and both have achieved a level of stability that may have been hard to imagine when they were younger. When the woman was young and trying to make it as a magazine writer, she and her best friend sometimes resorted to prostitution in order to pay rent. Her feelings about it at the time are more lighthearted than one would expect: “It seemed of a piece with the pleasing artifice of clubs and magazines, an almost comical piece, more real and more absurd than dating.” Does she still see it the same way from late middle age?