With this news, a brightness overcomes Rebecca Ostlet. She declares he has her permission indeed and then drops the issue entirely. She begins talking about how difficult this has been for her, the widow’s obligation, staying inside her flat all day with naught but grief; how she is, from the bottom of her soul, an outdoors creature, and how her terribly brief marriage commits her, in her opinion, to no further sustained isolation from society—so the dinner plans they have this evening, she says, will be followed tomorrow morning by a lecture at the Royal Institution on the remains of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus by the discoverer himself, archaeologist John Turtle Wood, and the man started out as nothing more than an architect, does Downing know, and spent five whole years searching in vain before realizing there might be a paved road from the Magnesian Gate, a road leading right to the temple, which there of course was, six meters beneath, under sand—but at the end of her speech she inquires, and only if Downing is amenable, perhaps he should take the glass jar and store it in his bedroom tonight, while he is staying with her?

To all of this, Downing agrees, and later that evening, after a fine roast lamb, new potatoes and two bottles of claret, when everyone has relaxed, Rebecca Ostlet, having drank more than usual, opens up to Titus Downing about her husband: how distant Richard was from her almost as soon as they married. How he traveled all the time, and she never expected much more than a minimum of affection, but there had been no minimum of affection. “It was like he never thought about me at all,” she says, and Downing nods, listening to Rebecca’s sorrows in alternating states of amusement and pity, like he would a child explaining basic math. Because all of this he knows already, it’s internalized, and none of it he cares to hear another word about.

For no matter how many glasses of wine he drinks, Downing is not about to share with Lady Ostlet the dozens of nights he himself spent with Richard; that the two had, on many occasions, slept naked in each other’s arms, or how his own thin body fit so neatly around Richard’s corpulence; and Downing is certainly not going to explain how he and Richard had locked eyes at the Great Exhibition all those years ago over a small stuffed vixen, tail a-twitching; how Richard had led him down a long red-carpeted hallway and into the custodial closet where, amidst the Quick Silver, Rape Oil and Rottenstone, Ostlet kissed him with a passion Downing did not know existed in men, or how he pulled down Ostlet’s trousers and took his tough, chubby cock into his mouth, and although Downing had never before allowed himself to imagine that this was what he wanted or needed, all at once it was everything, and he shocked himself as he realized that he knew what to do, the knowledge was innate, and when Ostlet shuddered and emptied himself into Downing’s mouth, he concluded that no man ever truly loved publicly, true love was a secret, and as the two men walked back to the Exhibition, arm-brushing-arm, he saw the world very differently: that the adult human male was nothing more than a mammal in a suit, and Downing felt assured for the first time since leaving his childhood farm in Northumberland that he was Nature, and had he ever felt so like himself, so awake?—which is why he cares to hear none of Lady Ostlet’s complaints, except perhaps save one: