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their bellies and no means of supporting themselves when the attentions of their seducers had turned elsewhere. Usually those men found themselves upper-­class wives, got on with the business of being aristocrats, and forgot about the lower-­class women whose lives they had torn asunder.
    Besides . . . “We’re speaking of Lord Ashford. The nobleman who could have his pick of any woman he wants. The most desirable. The most beautiful. The last woman who’d attract that interest from him would be me, a lowly and unglamorous journalist .”
    â€œAh, don’t go trolling for compliments,” Maggie chided. “Besides which, there’s no better way of manipulating someone than through sex.” Cold cynicism glinted in Maggie’s eyes, and, beneath that, a deeper hurt Eleanor knew her friend would never acknowledge.
    â€œI will keep my eyes open and my legs closed,” Eleanor vowed.
    Though she was no virgin, she was at all times careful when it came to matters of sex. She’d learned long ago how to keep from conceiving, and marriage held no appeal, not when she was master of herself and answered to no man. Independence was the gem she clutched close. If her past lovers had been disappointed by her unwillingness to shackle herself to them, then it was a disappointment they’d had to suffer.
    She had her work, and control over her body and her purse strings. Not many other women—­aside from Maggie—­could claim the same.
    â€œAnd now,” Madame Hortense declared, “it’s time for the wig—­the perruque, ” she corrected herself, as if remembering her pretense of being French.
    The woman removed a wig from a wooden, head-­shaped block. The hair had been styled into a fashionable, tousled crop of light brown curls, exactly the style popular with the younger set of men.
    Eleanor held still as Madame Hortense settled the wig over her head, then adjusted it before pinning it into place.
    â€œHer hair’s shorter,” Maggie conceded, “but she doesn’t look much like a man. More like one of those ladies who wore their hair à la victime, ” she added, referring to the women of the last century who had cut their hair short to emulate the guillotine’s unfortunate prey.
    â€œBut I am not finished!” Madame Hortense snapped her fingers in Eleanor’s face. “Close your eyes until I say to open them. Same for you, Maggie. Then you will both see the wonder of my skill.”
    Eleanor shared a smile with Maggie. Theatrical ­people never were at a shortage for self-­esteem. But she obeyed Madame Hortense’s command and shut her eyes.
    It was a full half hour she waited. In the interim, the cosmetic artist applied all varieties of rather itchy items to Eleanor’s face and rubbed countless pungent-­smelling things, which had to be paint, onto her skin. Something even went onto her top lip. It wasn’t a comfortable process. Rather arduous, in fact, made even more so by the fact that her journalist’s curiosity burned to know just what, exactly, Madame Hortense was doing.
    As the process went on, Eleanor distracted herself by describing everything in her mind. She’d certainly include this procedure in her article. Readers might be intrigued by what it took to change a female into a male.
    Women might complain of the excessive amounts of time and effort it takes to attend to their appearance—­applications of creams, unguents, blemish reducers, freckle-­lighteners, perfumes, and a cornucopia of other nostrums and humbug all pressed upon the fairer sex, the object being the attainment of unattainable physical perfection. This, of course, also includes corsets, bust improvers, bust-­reduction binding, curling papers and irons, and the heavens know what else, all done in the name of representing our “best” self to the world at large, should our own natural