The Love of a Good Woman

All of these eight wonderful stories are about what people will do for love, and the unexpected routes their passion will force them to take.
An old landlady in Vancouver who alarms the just-married narrator with her prim advice about married life -- and "the peculiar threat" of a china cabinet that must be washed once a month -- is shown to have conspired when young in a crime of passion. A young mother, at the mercy of the "radiant explosion" that comes when she thinks of her secret life, abandons her baby and four-year old to be with her lover in the story "The Children Stay." A gruff old country doctor in the 1960s is discovered by his daughter to be helping desperate women, his "special patients." An impetuous young woman meets a visiting Indian student and conceives on a train from Vancouver to Toronto because of "the fact that you couldn't get condoms around the Calgary station, not for love or money." An Ontario farm wife's affair drives her husband to commit a...