Their courtship is done clandestinely and she is heady with this feeling she has for Alfie, a colorful character who visits her house and looks up to her father as a mentor. Her father realizes that his feather-headed daughter has fallen for Alfie and warns her against his unstable nature. But Fate has other plans. They are eventually united in holy matrimony. It is now her fertility that becomes a sore issue with Alfie, who continually lives in horror of falling into poverty and too big a family would only be a forerunner to this occurence. As the years go by, she becomes preoccupied by her brood of children, drugged by laudenum to preserve some sanity, wearied down by exhaustion as she is. Being a man of extremes, and easily susceptible to the Public Image, Alfie grows ashamed of his wife and begins to hint to her that they are mismatched in this union. Dodo is a rather simple girl at heart, who does not like to be taxed with too much intellectual stimulation, although she is in a perpetual state of admiration of her clever husband. But the burden of childbearing eventually takes up her entire strength, until she cannot afford to provide Alfie with the attentions he craves. He looks to other people for amusement and stimulation, making much of Alice (Dodo's sister), devastated by her sudden death. Things take a terrible turn when she loses two children and has a nervous breakdown. Sent away to recover her health, changes take place in the household with her unmarried sister Sissy so completely in charge of everything that upon her return, she feels like an intruder in the Gibson household. She attempts to bring things back to normal but the chasm has widen too far.