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There was something creepy about the femininity at Laurinda, something so cloistered and yet brimming with stifled sex that it reminded me of the Victorian whalebone corsets we once saw at the Werribee Park Mansion, which kept everything cramped tight, until the stitches unravelled and out poured mounds of naked pink and white. It was the femininity of tiny éclairs and teacups, crocheted collars and little pearl earrings, the young-girl-to-old-woman transition that skipped sexuality altogether, so that when you saw it - in Gina, for instance - it was as garish as a scarlet A on the chest.
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