“Yes, I rather think I was. It’s a real indignity, to catch pneumonia in the summertime. My mother says it was all the dissipation.”

“Dissipation? Really? You don’t seem like the dissipated sort.”

“Well, my mother’s idea of dissipation is a glass of sherry in the evening. Her side of the family is all Scotch Presbyterians. Strict,” he adds, apparently realizing Elfriede isn’t well acquainted with the tenets of Scotch Presbyterianism. “Damned strict.”

“So you were escaping.”

“Something like that. I finished university a year ago and thought—well, one’s only got this single chance to sin, before that inevitable time of life when one’s sins puncture the happiness of somebody else.”

“It’s not inevitable,” Elfriede says. “You don’t have to do it.”

“Do what? Go home and take up the law and become a respectable chap?”

“No. You should go back to Vienna instead. Go back to Vienna and the cafés and that girl of yours—”

“Frau von Kleist,” he says solemnly, “you’re making me weary with all your talk of rebellion. I’m a sick man, remember?”

“Of course.”

“I require a long period of rest and recuperation, not a program of debauchery.”

“How long—” She clears her throat and continues. “How long are you supposed to stay here?”

“As long as it takes. A month or two, perhaps. Just in time for autumn. And you, Frau von Kleist? How long do you expect to stay?”

She shrugs. “As long as it takes.”

“A month or two, perhaps? I’m afraid I don’t know much about nervous disorders.”

“More time than that, I think.”

There is a queer, heavy silence, the kind for which the clinic is famous. The deep peace of the mountains settles over Elfriede, a sense of motionless isolation that sometimes unnerves her, or increases her melancholy, because it seems as if she’s the only human being in the world, and she wants passionately to belong to somebody, anybody, almost anybody. Elfriede smells the wildflowers, the faint odor of something cooking in the refectory kitchen—it’s nearly lunchtime—and something else as well, a peculiar, indecipherable scent she will come to recognize as that of Herr Thorpe himself, a scent that will forever remind her of mountains, even in the middle of a teeming, dirty city.

Herr Thorpe murmurs, “There’s the orderly.”

Elfriede glances to the infirmary door, and the white-uniformed man presently emerging from it. A shimmer of panic crosses her chest, the way you feel when the nurse arrives to draw your blood from your veins. She climbs to her feet atop the wall.

“I must be going, Herr Thorpe—”

“Wilfred.”

“Wilfred.” She hesitates. “My name is Elfriede.”

He presents her with that wide grin, one eye squinted. “Why, it’s practically the same as mine! What are the chances, do you think?”

“Very slim, I think.”