Free Love's a Stage by Laura London

copy of Fanny Hill. Steam Power Practicum suffered in offended silence beside Ben Varney’s Body Verse .
    The man in the gray cape had followed Frances and Rivington inside, and as Rivington began to unlace Frances’ mud-limp kid boots, the man made the comment that Richard was getting so many fillies that there was no keeping track of them, and asked with vague interest if he’d met Miss Atherton before.
    Frances couldn’t detect the slightest trace of embarrassment in Rivington’s face as he looked over his shoulder and told the man, “She’s not mine —hand me that towel, will you please, sir.” Rivington accepted the huckaback towel from the man and started to rub Frances’ feet. “Frances, your toes are like ice! Oh, and this is my esteemed sire.” He gestured behind him with the towel. “No one uses his real name—he goes by Captain Zephyr. A little conceit of his.”
    Rivington’s lack of filial deference seemed to please rather than annoy his father. Zephyr gave his son a playful nudge with the toe of one boot and smiled in the way of a besotted parent who finds a choice witticism in any chance utterance of his offspring. Captain Zephyr’s smile widened as Frances exclaimed:
    “Not The Captain Zephyr?”
    Captain Zephyr acknowledged it.
    “The Captain Zephyr who ascended eight thousand feet in a gas balloon at Frankfurt-am-Main?” asked Frances with awe.
    Again, Captain Zephyr nodded, looking at Frances in a particularly approving fashion.
    “The most daring of all British aeronauts?”
    Captain Zephyr beamed at Frances, modestly disclaimed being the most daring, and asked her if she was a student of aeronautics.
    “No, sir, I have only a small understanding of what I know to be a complex subject, but my elder brother, Charles, takes a great interest in all branches of the science, and before he left for the mission in North Africa he used to talk of it for hours at a stretch! Once, when Charles was at Oxford, he saw you make an ascension from Hyde Park and he said ever after that it was one of the high points of his education.” Since Frances had forgotten that the context of her brother’s remark had been a condemnation of the quality of university instruction, and not in praise of the ascension, she had been able to speak with what Captain Zephyr found the most satisfying enthusiasm. Frances continued: “And the ropes in the hallway, sir. Are they—could they be the ropes from your balloon?”
    The tone of Frances’ voice injected a respect for the ropes that, if it didn’t elevate them to a holy relic, at least placed them on par with the Stone of Scone. Captain Zephyr had by now decided that Frances was the most charming and intelligent of the many young women he had seen in his very attractive son’s company.
    “They are!” confirmed Zephyr. “Last time I went up with Richard here and my nephew, Giles, we took a rip in the balloon fabric and were forced down in a pigpen.”
    “Enveloping a herd of squealing porkers,” added Rivington with a grin. “If you think the rope’s a shambles, you ought to have seen our balloon! What a way to travel!”
    Captain’s Zephyr’s right eyebrow quirked into a right angle at the heretical tenor of this opinion, but his voice was perfectly affectionate as he advised his son not to be an impudent chaw-bacon. “In twenty years, Miss Atherton,” Captain Zephyr informed her, “balloons will change the way we live. On the corners where you see hackney carriages for hire, there will be balloon stands, ready to ferry people wherever they wish. And at a nominal sum—nominal, Miss Atherton! No need to worry any longer about carriages overturning, or a horse with a strained tendon. No more jolting coach rides over rutted roads! The smoothness of balloon travel is unimaginable. Tell me, Miss Atherton, have you been up in one? No? We’ll take you then!”
    However thrilled Frances might be by the Romance of Balloons, those who ascended in them were