"It's just such a shame that poor Bitsy hooked herself up with Sandra," Henrietta said glumly. "She really wasn't qualified for the job. She had an entirely different agenda."

"What was that?"

"Oh, I thought you'd have noticed," Henrietta said. "The big-deal feminist thing. We both fell in with that when we got out into the real world together, but recovered from it quite soon. It's pointless. Once you've done a couple of jobs well, you get recommended to other people by the quality of your work, not your gender."

"Don't you have trouble mostly with male contractors?" Shelley said.

"We normally work for individual customers. And we still do custom furniture," Jacqueline said. "When the few contractors we've worked with see our portfolios of work we've done, we usually get the job."

"Except for that one really macho guy who was terrified to bits about lesbians," Henrietta said. "He seemed to think it was a disease of some sort."

"That's odd," Shelley said. "It seems as if most macho types are more scared of male gays. More of a threat to them, they seem to think."

"That's usually true in our experience as well," Henrietta said. "But Sandra took her militant feminism far too seriously. I'm sorry she died and all that, but it was divisive. Calling us all by men's names was so stupid and insulting. Nobody's ever done that to us before. I refused to address her as Sandy. I think Bitsy's the only one who does so."

"You really didn't like working with her?"

"The name thing was silly," Jacqueline said. "I don't mind being called Jackie. It's a common nickname and easier than Jacqueline to say. But what I really disliked was that she wasn't a knowledgeable contractor. The contracts that Bitsy let her draw up were ridiculous and showed her ignorance of the business."

"We found that to be true as well," Shelley said. "We still aren't really hired, you know, until the conn-act we were offered is extensively amended."