“He has abided by your agreement. I can attest. It isn’t sex with him that I’m after.”

“Love and sex are little acquainted in this house.”

“My proposal arises from the sincere feeling I have for your husband, for his genius. All I ask is the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily. I don’t think I can live without it.”

“You want to live here, with us?”

“Live lightly, not impede or impose. To give him, frankly, the one pleasure he cannot find with you.”

“Has he told you that?”

“He finds you endlessly alluring,” I said.

“But not his equal in mind? Or is it your judgment that I am not his equal.”

“I’m not here to judge you.”

“Yes, you are. You find me vain, frivolous, infantile, capricious. One begins to wonder whether you aim less to free women than abolish us altogether, while you play the impoverished writer, forsaking temptations of the world for what you think are higher claims.”

“We would be complete, the three of us. Body, mind, heart. Believe me, Sophia, if I thought my passion criminal, I would conquer it or die in the attempt. Immodesty, in my eyes, is ugliness.”

“How repressively didactic.” She stood, and walked to the window. I remember the swish of her taffeta skirts, a cool pride I’d never seen.

“It was my idea to send you the painting,” she said.

“Your idea?”

“Fuseli hates to let even one go. He wants to keep everything.” She turned and swept her arm across the extravagant exhibit of paintings. “As you can see.”

“But he could’ve kept it, if he’d wanted it. I don’t desire to look at myself.”

She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me. “When Henry and I made our ‘agreement,’ as you call it, he told me I could have an affair with anyone I cared to, with one caveat: that I didn’t fall in love. I was surprised, because he believes himself incapable of it. I know that he treasures me, in his way, but if he were to love me in the way I wanted, he would give up too much of his power, which is what he seeks most of all. And if I loved someone else, he would lose all of it. As him loving someone else would threaten mine.”

“You said yourself he’s incapable of love.”

“Believes he’s incapable. Resists with all his armaments: wit, reason, cruelty, sex—whatever will defeat it,” she said. “But only because it terrifies him.”

“You think I terrify him?”

“Being swallowed up by the other, lost, dominated, diminished, that’s what frightens him,” she said, fingering the ruffle at her wrist. “He thinks it the sign of a weak man.”