When Jane saw Julietta, she was unable to stop a deep blush from suffusing the very cheeks which Emmeline was tentatively sketching in with dabs of pink and white. Emmeline put down her brush and looked at the two faces so intently held by the gaze of the other, and believed she understood what was occurring.

‘Julietta, my dear,’ said Emmeline. ‘Will you take some tea with us?’

‘Thank you, Emmeline,’ said Julietta. ‘But I will not stay long. I fear I’m interrupting important work. But it was only …’

‘That you had something to say to Jane?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then let me leave the two of you together, unless you would prefer to go to Jane’s room and talk to her there.’

‘Well yes, why don’t we do that? Jane?’

‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘If you do not mind, Emmeline?’

‘Of course not. I have much to tidy up here. You need not hurry in your conversation.’

The two women went quickly up the stairs and as they went, Julietta reached out for Jane’s hand. Julietta Sims, great beauty that she was, had had many lovers since her marriage to Ashton Sims and most of these lovers had been women. It was thus that when she found herself alone with Jane Adeane in her room, sensing perhaps that Jane was a virgin in all respects, she took it upon herself to make plain her passion at once, without any modesty or fuss.

She laid Jane down on her bed and kissed her mouth. Though Jane had never before been kissed in this way, Julietta sensed at once that the embrace awoke in her feelings so powerful that whatever Julietta had in mind to do, Jane would surrender to it.

Julietta took out the tortoiseshell comb which held her elaborate coiffure in place and let her dark hair fall in a silky curtain round Jane’s face.

‘Now,’ she whispered, ‘nobody can see us!’

‘I do not care,’ said Jane. ‘I do not care who sees us. I do not care about anything except this. Show me how to love you.’

Julietta next undid Jane’s bodice, and pushed the clothes aside to reveal her breasts, caressing them first with her soft white hand, then fastening her lips on them. She liked to do this, when she made love to a woman, to give the breasts tender attention, first sucking on them, then removing her own garments to take the other into her arms. She knew that this soft prelude, drawn out gently in time, could engender such a yearning wildness of desire in that select band of women lovers she named her ‘beauties’ that when at last her fingers reached down to begin to caress the almost-hidden place where real pleasure kept its audacious secret, they could make a jouissance arrive almost immediately.

Such was Julietta’s power that this ecstasy never brought to an end their surrender to passion, but only increased it, very soon making them crave her tongue where her hand had been. And Julietta’s tongue was very skilled. Among the ‘beauties’, the words J’ai envie de la langue de Juliette became a teasing code between them, telling each other that it was a woman’s knowing touch they craved, and that they craved it now. Whispered among themselves in polite drawing rooms, this little phrase could make them wild with desire and sometimes lead them out into the dark night, telling their menfolk that they simply wished to breathe the night air, but in fact to lean against the trees of ancient parks and give each other the rapid but gorgeous satisfaction they almost never got from their husbands’ attempts at love-making.