Yeah, I'm kind of going for that. Although there's a horror element.

... and on that note, I really appreciate that you explain the impact of culture for these pages, as I know nothing about Victorian society!

Thanks for that input. :) I guess that I've been assuming most of my audience to be at least vaguely familiar with Victorian manners. That may not be a completely reasonable assumption.

Well, I guess when I say I know "nothing," I mean I know at least the rough concept of the time period and society - I am just lost on exact things like "rank" or whom will get in trouble for screwing who, etc ;]

The restrictions placed on young unmarried people of the opposite sex (at least in high class people; the majority population of suffering industrial workers aren't usually mentioned in the literature) were much more extreme and complicated than I thought when I started researching it. I once considered courting a young lady with an approximation of Victorian formality (I wanted to be cute and romantic or something), but even an approximation led to barely seeing her, so I scrapped it.

This posed an interesting barrier to the story I wanted to tell, so I tweaked it a little. I was thinking that in a multispecies world, relations between same-species couples might follow something like the historical social rules, but interspecies relations might have a completely different set of formalities. That line of thought led to this whole plot chunk.

I can't decide which I love more: Danielle's expressions on the previous page, or her feet on this one.

heh. Poor little nervous, tucked under her Danielle pawsies.