Abstract or not, Edwin thinks that Baby Joe shouldn’t be hearing any of this. He thinks that Rosalie has lost her mind. She’s so gullible. She reads too many books. He himself stopped listening about the time Byron was wanting to marry his sister. Where has Rosalie heard such nonsense?

It can only have come from Mother. Mother and Rosalie are prone to quiet, private conversations while they beat the rugs, hang the laundry, churn the butter. He’s always assumed they were deciding what to make for supper. Now it appears they’ve been sharing licentious, depraved gossip instead. Mother! And Rose!

Edwin and Asia have, on occasion, performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and he’s tried to make it as real as he can, but he certainly doesn’t want to marry Asia. He pities the man who does. Nor does he want to discuss free love with Rosalie. Nothing could be more embarrassing. He needs to get back to his costumes.

“ ‘Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine,’ ” Rosalie is saying now, because apparently this is something Byron used to say. She leaves no pause during which Edwin might extricate himself from the whole horrid conversation.

“Scree, scree,” says Baby Joe, who has his own ways of escaping.

The way Rosalie sees it, pretty much everyone in London was abandoning their wives to run away with their sweethearts around the time that Father met Mother. It seems to have been quite the fad. Sodom and Gomorrah with tea.

She is either accusing Mother and Father or she is defending them. Edwin can’t figure out which. He thinks that she’s angry, although with Rosalie it’s always hard to tell. She speaks quietly, but there is something in the way she is working the dough as if stabbing at it with her spoon. “We’re no better than anyone else,” Rosalie says, “for all Father’s airs. A lot of people will think we’re worse now. Practically everyone will think that.”

It comes to Edwin then what Rosalie is really talking about. Two years ago, Father had taken them all to the circus, where Rosalie met a handsome policeman-turned-lion-tamer from New York named Jacob Driesbach. Driesbach worked without cages, no bars between his cats and an audience full of tender young children. As they watched, he wrestled a full-grown tiger to the ground. He invited several lions to sup with him at a large dining table. The best of manners were observed, each cat in its own chair, no cat commencing to eat until Driesbach, the host, did so. And all the while, he wore a glittering Arabian costume tight around the legs and his muscled arms bare. Naturally, Rosalie was impressed.