At first I wasn’t sure of my place at the table. But when Johnson published my Original Stories and the novel that fall, with my own name on the cover, I felt their regard grow, that is, until the arrival of the much-anticipated Henry Fuseli—Johnson couldn’t stop talking about him—just back from some Roman picture tour. He was Johnson’s best friend, though they could not have been less alike. Fuseli was always last to arrive, like the legend he was, cutting a dash in the room, his silver-streaked hair going this way and that, as if he’d just come from a windswept moor or a ship tossed at sea. He was near fifty, gnomish and bowlegged, with a nose too grand for his small face, and a heavy brow over smart, piercing eyes that seemed to look straight through everyone. He sat opposite Johnson at the long oval table, a seat that was always his, in front of the very picture he himself had painted that dominated the room: a sleeping woman bathed in white light and loosely clothed, arms and head flung over the edge of a bed, hair falling like a fountain, with a demonic incubus crouching on her loins. The whole painting shone with blackness, the woman the only light there was. I couldn’t help staring at it, now that the artist himself was present.

“Ah, my Nightmare. Does it shock, frighten, or titillate you?” Fuseli asked when he found me staring at it over his shoulder.

“It does seem she’s having a horrific dream,” I said.

I caught a lightning glance from Fuseli to Johnson, as if to say, Ah, you’ve brought me new prey.

“Oh no,” said Fuseli. “That is a painful and soul-shuddering ecstasy. The incubus has made love to her in her sleep. She’s been shaken to her core, deliciously depleted.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps she ate a bit of bad pork.”

Fuseli was quick-witted and pugnacious, had eight languages and a degree in theology. He considered conversation a blood sport, could speak of the highest things, but preferred the lowest. Everyone adored him most when he recounted his sexual exploits, with men and women. I knew he hoped to shock me, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“Well, I’m not easily titillated,” I said, neatly quartering my potato. “I’m no prude. I simply believe that sex oppresses women; it doesn’t free them at all.”

“It certainly frees them of their clothes, and inhibitions,” he said, to laughter all around.

“Aren’t you married, Mr. Fuseli?”

“Indeed, I am. Quite recently. But Sophia Rawlins enjoys the same privileges, I assure you. Equality of sex, isn’t that what you want?”

“Of the sexes, yes. But equality is difficult when gifted men so often mate with their inferiors, beauty coupled with a childish vivacity—like sporting lambs and kittens.”