“I love the idea that one with only male or female parts is an ‘imperfect’ flower, but one with both, that can reproduce on its own, has achieved the status of a ‘perfect’ flower.”

She was standing beside me with her hands on her hips, surveying her own drawings. She blew away a lock of hair that had fallen across her forehead, and pointed to the topmost part at the center of one of her flowers.

“They call this female part the ‘stigma.’ It’s where bees and insects drop the pollen in. But why a ‘stigma,’ I often wonder? I think of a stigma as a stain or scar.”

“A blot, a disgrace,” I said.

She looked at me. “A taint, a mark, a blame.”

“Yes,” I said, turning back to the drawing. “Females take so much blame, don’t they, for everything, and deserve almost none of it.”

“I think I would call it the ‘vessel’ instead.”

“The blessed vessel.”

“The blessed vessel,” she repeated. “Yes.”

And like that, somehow, I knew that Fanny Blood would be the truest friend of my life.

She had better handwriting than I, better writing altogether, was calmer, neater, more precise in her thoughts and words, more disciplined and demanding in her thinking. Yet she possessed a sense of wonder; she laughed easily, at even the silliest things, and was capable of whimsy. Like me, she had a father who drank and gambled, but she didn’t resent him, and had found, through her drawings, a way to support herself and her family. She loved Nature as much as I did, taught me the names of more flowers than I knew—the perfect and imperfect alike. In public we observed a personal reserve, but in private we were better than sisters, brushing each other’s hair, talking through the night, arguing over petty nothings, just for the fun of it. Every step I took toward her was rewarded with a step closer to me.

We soon began dreaming aloud of a life together. We would read and study without interruption. She would teach me the German and Latin she knew, and we would teach ourselves French, some days converse in French alone. We would take turns making meals, or stand side by side and cook them together; we’d share books, clothes (our simple taste); she might teach me to draw, I might teach her to dance, and if we could only afford one bed, we would share that too. We would make, the two of us, a perfect household, where we would be the male and female parts together, whole unto ourselves, without a man.