However as the story unfolds Mr Hepburn's wife dies and Mr Hepburn is left in the lurch, and the intruder situation is reversed. However the central and relevant theme is the mysterious allure that both the Countess Hannele and March feel towards the male intruders, to the point where they are willing to sacrifice their loving and cherishing partners and comfortable abodes. It seems that the "white lining- - the comfortable marriage and security of their mundane lives - was not sufficient to provide the social, sexual or psychological fulfilment that these characters sought. The "true living world- for these characters is below the fazade of marriage and conventional love; it is to be discovered deeper, as Count Dionys said, a mystical world that is "dark, throbbing, darker than blood-. .
In The Fox, Banford is introduced as being "nervous and delicate- with "a warm, generous soul-. However the heroine, March, is described as being "so odd and absent in herself-, implying an emptiness in her life that is echoed in Captain Hepburn in The Captain's Doll. The Captain insists "I'm not important a bit, and believes that "Nothing in time or space matters to me-. Both characters are living by the "luminous world-, which is only the "white lining- of reality, and hence feel vacant and hollow. March complains of the fowls, who are her source of life (food and income) as holding her down, as she believed herself to be "a creature of odd whims and unsatisfied tendencies-. She continues: "from all these things she was prevented by the stupid fowls-. The fowls here are representative of her life - she is safe in her "cage- or house with Banford, however she has a dark and irrational urge for freedom from the cage, to be devoured and mastered by the masculine figure of the fox. Similarly Daphne in The Ladybird is imprisoned by bourgeois constraints which deny her true nature.
When March sees the fox she is enchanted.
