I took my own sip of burning tea, trying to think of something safe to say. “I believe young girls ought to live more meaningful, more virtuous lives.”

“I quite agree,” she said. “But what is meaning? What, virtue?”

“I would have them cultivate their minds … and their bodies,” I said.

“Their bodies?” said the widow, blowing into the black ruffled neck that came all the way to her triple chin. “Do you mean dance steps?”

I set down my cup. “I mean running, Mrs. Burgh. Jumping. Climbing trees. Feeling the grass between their naked toes.”

“Naked toes?”

“For how can one know the natural world, or one’s place in it, one’s true self, without seeing it from on high and up close?”

The windows rattled just then. I glanced outside at the gust and whoosh in the treetops.

“Does the wind frighten you, Miss Wollstonecraft?”

When I turned back, she looked dismayed. “No. I draw strength from it.”

“I can see that you are fine-tuned,” she said. “And, I suppose, a devotee of the current ‘culture of sensibility.’ It is the fashion.”

“It is not fashion with me, Mrs. Burgh, but nature.”

“A Rousseau follower, then? My husband abhorred Rousseau.”

“With me it’s not all nature, but it comes close. I am fine-tuned, but only as it exhilarates my sense and exalts my sensibility. I don’t want girls to be artificial beings, the sum of custom and manners, without reason or feeling, when they ought to have both. If only I could give them the education I wish I’d had—”

“Go on,” she said, her spine stiffer.

“You see, in my relatively brief experience of a girl’s education, I found not much to recommend the tinkling on a harpsichord, spouting a few well-placed words of French, and parading around in unnatural protuberances, hoops and corsets and such, that have no relation whatsoever to the shape of the female body.” Widow Burgh furrowed her brow, but I moved closer to the edge of the settee. “I believe young women have minds that are the equal of any man, yet they’re taught to develop the merest aspect that would attract a husband, and nothing more, lest they scare said husband away.”

“Are you against marriage, then?” she cut in.

“For myself, yes.” I sat up straighter. “I should like to see marriage not the only hope of securing a woman’s future, but a choice she might make if she could find the right partner, though I doubt he exists, and lead a more meaningful life than being just a wife. Meaning being itself a virtue.”

“Say more,” she commanded, “about how one teaches that.”