The thing was—and he’d tried to explain this to her the previous week—he just couldn’t get it out of his mind. He was paid to experiment, to be creative, to unlock the chemical secrets of natural substances (like ergot, a parasitic fungus of grains that had been used in preparation by midwives from time immemorial) in order to produce new medicines for the company so that the company could market them and make a profit for its investors, and, by extension, its employees. That was his job, his fulfillment, his pleasure in the work—the natural world presented a mystery and it was the object of science to chip away at that mystery and see what lay beneath it. He had a hunch about this synthesis, that was what he’d told her (“Ich habe ein Vorgefühl”), this one above all the others, and though it was unusual to continue experimenting on a drug once Pharmacology had passed judgment on it, he couldn’t help feeling there was something here they were all missing. And so, on Friday she’d assisted him in preparing a new synthesis for further trials. And on Friday he’d inadvertently poisoned himself and had to go home early. Now it was Monday, the first day of the workweek, and he was proposing to poison himself all over again, intentionally this time.

He was right there, as close as he’d ever been to her, and her heart was pounding in her chest. Strangely, his eyes didn’t seem to blink—he was fixated, not on her but on something beyond her, through her, an idea—and for the longest moment he didn’t say a thing. When he told her what he was proposing, she let out a little cry—she couldn’t help herself; she was that shocked. “But wouldn’t it be better to test it on animals first—in the event, I mean, in case there are adverse effects, or you, you—?”

She had to look away from him. It wasn’t her place to question him—he’d gone to university, he was an educated man, he was her boss, and she was a girl still, just twenty-one. She hadn’t even gone to high school. None of the girls she knew had—in her place and time women were expected to marry and raise a family. Period. Oh, maybe they’d work for a year or two as au pairs or apprentices in a shop, as typists or assistants in a chemistry lab, but marriage was their prospect and their destiny and that made a high school education strictly de trop.