What is the main conflict in Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault?

The title story, set in San Francisco in the late 1960s, describes the experiences of a young actress, Angela Anson, who has a day job as a social worker at the county hospital. She carries out the duty of assigning patients on the women's ward to beds at other institutions, but otherwise resists her role as a cog in the bureaucracy, identifying strongly with the downtrodden and lonely women on the ward. Meditating on the patients, Angela makes imaginative connections between the destinies that all women share, forming a theory that women are "inseparable from their beds." "Women in Their Beds" has a dreamlike logic that blurs the boundaries between self and other, fact and feeling, drama and reality. The story showcases Berriault's greatest strengths as a writer: the precise beauty of her language, the vivid comparisons she draws between perception and reality, and the enormous compassion with which she represents her characters.