“Oh, my bride has vivacity, all right, as well as beauty, and ‘sports’ like the devil. Mrs. Fuseli is no philosophical sloven. Her hair is not lank at all,” he said, cutting into his meat.

I set down my knife and fork. “I should rather you spoke of my sentences than my hair.”

“Well, then, I find it all loose and informal, without structure.”

“My sentences, or my hair?”

He covered his smile by flourishing his knife in the air. “You have a sort of disorganized, running style.”

“True to the way I think, and feel. I seek propulsion, an openness to experience, honesty. Not flaccid, love-fixated romances.”

“‘Flaccid,’ you say?” interjected Darwin, an expansive, bulbous man of sixty, who wanted to play. “Have you read my Loves of the Plants? It was deemed too pornographic for unmarried female readers!”

“In fact,” I said, “one woman asked me whether she might read your book without losing her female delicacy.”

“And what did you tell her?” asked Johnson.

“That she could not. And by all means, should read it at once!”

Darwin threw back his head and laughed, then wiped his face with the napkin tucked in at his neck, suddenly serious. “You know, every specimen is some combination of male and female sex organs, which has equality built into it, as Nature prefers.”

“Our Erasmus is only interested in the sex life of flowers, I’m afraid,” said Fuseli, flashing his dark eyes at me.

“I believe the canna lily boasts one male and one female in each flamboyant flower,” I said.

“An ideal arrangement!” said Darwin. “Our Miss Wollstonecraft is a proficient in botany!”

“I once cared deeply for someone who was,” I said, bringing a curious silence to the table.

“More pistil or stamen, your botanist?” Darwin asked, with a mouth full of roast beef.

Fuseli set his chin on folded hands, awaiting my answer. “My guess is pistil,” he said, as if reading my mind. “I take it from the Mary in your novel that she has a great passion for her female friend.”

“The point is having the freedom to love, not which gender.”

“The freedom to pluck each other’s petals, shall we say?” He popped a potato into his mouth, getting laughs. “Certainly your girl doesn’t care much for men.”

“No man can offer the erotic satisfaction that Nature can. As I said, sex with men is uniformly a disaster because it’s fundamentally unfree and chokes a woman’s capacity for genius.”

This brought guffaws all around. I thought Darwin might choke on his beef.

“Sex with men,” said Fuseli. “Have you had any?”

My cheeks flushed, I could feel it. I had never loved a man, it was true. I don’t believe a man had ever loved me. But I had loved a woman, whose memory was the most precious thing I possessed.