Feeling her head swim a little and needing to sit down, Jane took her plate of chicken to the staircase – a place where she habitually liked to perch for long periods of solitary time and listen to the lively passing and re-passing of horse-drawn traffic in this leafy corner of London.

Here, exactly where she always chose to sit, she found a publisher by the name of Ashton Sims, a small, serious man of forty-five, sitting alone with his food, and she asked if she might join him.

Ashton Sims, co-proprietor of the highly successful and lucrative publishing house of Kirkwall & Sims, stood up and bowed to her. He was, he said, an ardent admirer and purchaser of Emmeline Adeane’s work and was ‘more than enchanted to meet her niece’.

‘I hear,’ he said to Jane, ‘that Emmeline is wrestling with a portrait of you. I wonder why she used the word “wrestling”.’

‘Oh,’ said Jane. ‘This is what people always find themselves doing with me. They want to capture me and I am reluctant to let that happen.’

Ashton Sims smiled. ‘I imagine that is very wise of you. You must talk to my wife, Julietta. Julietta is very vehement on the subject of men’s “ownership” of women. She says Western Society is primitive in this regard, and I suspect you would agree?’

‘Well,’ said Jane, ‘I have never been to anywhere considered actually “primitive”, such as a forest in Borneo, where I am told human heads are sometimes used as decoration, but I think Julietta is right; men use women as chattels and adornments. They just don’t cut their heads off first.’

Ashton Sims exploded with laughter. At this moment, a dark young woman appeared at the foot of the stairs and Sims called out to her, ‘Julietta, come up! You must hear Miss Adeane’s joke!’

Julietta Sims paused in the hall to have her glass refilled, then made her way towards the stairs on which her husband and Jane were sitting. She sat down just below them. When Ashton introduced her to Jane, Julietta set down her champagne glass and held out a slim, soft hand and placed it in Jane’s with infinite tenderness, as though the two women had been friends in former times and were now meeting up again after a long absence.

Jane felt the sweetness of the hand-clasp and risked letting her gaze dwell on Julietta’s face for a lingering moment. It had long been apparent to all in Emmeline Adeane’s circle of friends that Julietta Sims – Italian by birth but made rather exquisitely pale by her long immersion in London’s sunless weather – was a person of exceptional beauty, but perhaps no one had ever been as enthralled by it as Jane felt herself to be at that instant on the stairs. The light was soft and flattering, coming only from candles in two wall sconces, but even taking this into consideration, Jane knew that she was looking at a kind of human perfection, seldom seen.