With all her great curiosity about the world, it had been fascinating to Jane Adeane to experience a man’s desire in its wildness and desperation and she had had no choice, once she had agreed to marry Ross, but to submit. It had even excited her a little, at first, to be the object of such adoration and animal striving, but as the attempts at love-making went on night after night, she had soon enough felt slightly suffocated by it and did not entirely enjoy being held beneath the body of a man, crushed even, as he cried and shouted his way to his own delirium.

Jane told herself that marriage would calm him and that they would settle into some kind of tranquillity in bed, yet this was not quite what she wanted either. She wanted to feel with Ross the same kind of yearning and the same kind of excitement and satisfaction as she had felt with Julietta, but she knew she was a long way from that. The ‘flashes of lightning’ were all experienced by him.

What was she to do?

Julietta had suggested to her that men needed to be taught how to arouse women and she had been bold enough to press Ross’s head down between her legs, but once there, with his beard feeling rough against her thighs, he had not known what to do, except to kiss her a little, so the attempt was abandoned and never tried again. The jouissance Jane had arrived at so easily and so frequently with Julietta never happened with Valentine Ross.

It thus came slowly into Jane’s mind that she would have to let marriage return her – paradoxically – to the state of virginity she had inhabited prior to her meeting with Julietta. Before she’d been touched by Julietta, her sexual self had been dormant, in a condition of quietude. All her passion had gone into her powers of healing. She was the Angel of the Baths and that had been enough.

Now, she would have to go back to that – to finding joy in touching people only to cure them and take away their pain. And she saw how she had to include her future husband in this, for what was his terrible passion for her except pain – unless it could be satisfied? And only she could satisfy it. She would submit herself to what seemed to be a very pressing and overbearing need and his sufferings would be assuaged.

Was she capable of doing this?

She didn’t know.

She tried to let her mind embrace the other changes to her life that marriage to Valentine Ross would bring: a house of her own, the establishment of a successful medical practice, in which she would be given the status of an almost equal partner, the possibility of a child. She saw that, in the eyes of many, she was destined for a fulfilled and happy life. But she knew that if she was to find this happiness, then there was one task which she had to accomplish: she had to renounce Julietta.