'You are becoming a bad girl', Mama said to me years and years ago, but hugged and kissed me as she spoke. There was at least complicity in her reproof, whereas with Phillip all was dullness and unknowing in his very soul. To speak of naughtiness to him was counted as a sin, and yet I cannot find in it anything but an affirmation of desire which, if it is cloaked, will only spread its roots down more.

There is love when a tongue between my lips sweeps round my own-love when my breasts are burnished and my nipples stiffened by a fondling hand.

Last night I sat with Richard on the couch. He kissed my lips; his hand roamed to my breasts and felt their weight and their protuberance. In a moment he had sleeked that self-same hand beneath my skirt and murmured at the plumpness of my thighs.

I am in sin. Is it better than to be frustrated? I have been lax with him before. That last night at the house before we left, I let him kiss me with abandon, permitted him to loose my drawers till I thrust him up and took myself up to my ever-hopeful marriage bed, there to be scorned-indeed, almost reviled. Have I in truth what Phillip called a 'coarse, lewd tongue' when a fever of desire is in my veins? Should I be as marble, quiet as a church crypt? Never was I chided in my youth for saying naughty things in bed, or in the hayloft, in the summerhouse. There were sparklings then of love and lust combined, and sweet they were and heady as an old champagne. My cousin, Edward, had my sister, Adelaide, upon the lawn, and dusk it was, and we were seen; I had no doubt that we were seen by eyes that peered out from the house. And then it was I who fell and had my drawers pulled down by one who had waited on a moment such as that. Adelaide's eyes enchanted mine as we both came, and drew the sperm into our willing quims.

You have been educated', Mama said that night, though she pretended not to know what had passed upon the summer grass.