iss," the reader is introduced to another fixed character, Bertha Young. Bertha is a 30 year-old wife and mother who is a housewife embodying "the status of non-work (d'Arcy 248)." Bertha Young is seen as planning a dinner party and, significantly, as becoming vulnerable to a series of erotic feelings which are first, narcissistic, secondly, oriented toward another woman, and finally, erotically pointed at her male spouse. Thomas Dilworth (141) states that in this story, Mansfield explores the homoerotic urge that many women feel but do not give into expressing. These urges are presented in the Freudian context as perfectly normal and as liberating.
However, Mansfield is seen by Dilworth (142) as stopping before allowing her protagonist to become overly involved in these lesbian longings. It is no accident that Bertha Young shifts her desire from the female object, Miss Fulton, to the more legitimate object of her own husband. It is at this juncture that Mansfield makes it clear to the reader that Mr. Young and Miss Fulton are likely to be engaged in an affair of their own: as she is departing from the dinner party, he tells her she is adored and they arrange to meet "tomorrow.
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