Study Questions
1. What is Marian’s job?

2. Why does she envy Ainsley her job as a tester of defective
electric toothbrushes?

3. Where do Marian and Ainsley live?

4. Describe Marian’s relationship to Ainsley.

5. What does Marian look at on her way to work?

6. Why is Marian unhappy with her company’s mandatory pension plan?

7. What is Ainsley’s nickname for Marian’s colleagues, Emmy, Lucy, and Millie?

8. Why is Peter upset about his friend Trigger’s marriage?

9. When Marian visits her friend Clara, what does she think her role will be for the evening?

10. What does Ainsley think of Marian’s relationship to Peter?

Answers
1. Marian works for Seymour Surveys, a market research company. She revises questionnaires.

2. She thinks Ainsley is lucky because her job is more temporary and unusual.

3. They live on the top floor of a large house in one of the older and more genteel districts of town.

4. They are roommates but do not have very much in common. They met just before they moved in together. Before that Ainsley was a friend of a friend.

5. She likes to look at the advertisements in the bus on her way to work.

6. Marian feels as though the pension plan binds her to an unavoidable future where a preformed self awaits.

7. Ainsley’s nickname for them is the three “office virgins.”

8. Trigger was the last of Peter’s unmarried friends. When their other friends had gotten married, Peter and Trigger had “clutched each other like drowning men.”

9. She thinks her role will be that of blotter. That is, she will have to absorb some of Clara’s boredom.

10. Ainsley thinks that Marian has been monopolized by Peter.