She held out her hand to me, and I clasped it. The coldness shocked me, but what did I expect? I always seemed to simmer a degree or two warmer than other women. I opened my mouth to ask her particulars, how all these lovely plans might be set into motion, but she spoke first.

“Let’s return to our guests, shall we? There are so many people I’d like you to meet.”

Elfriede

September 1900

(Switzerland)

“If something were to happen to my husband,” Elfriede says, “which God forbid, I wouldn’t marry again.”

“No. No. I don’t see why you should. I never did understand why women agree to marriage, unless perhaps as a kind of business arrangement.”

His answer so surprises her, she sits up and turns to stare at him. They’re lying side by side in a meadow not far from the clinic, but shielded from view by the shoulder of the mountain and, for good measure, by a stand of shrubby trees. Though the sun’s out and the temperature warm, the wildflowers have begun to die out by now. Color and scent have faded. Thank goodness for sunshine, then. Turning Wilfred’s hair—growing out nicely—a bright, autumnal copper. He lies with his arms raised, elbows bent, hands cradling the back of his head, and he stares back at her in enchantment.

“You’ve got grass in your hair,” he says.

Elfriede reaches for the back of her head. “Why do you say that? About marriage?”

“I just think it’s a rum deal all around, don’t you? Particularly for the women. Most wives—not all, by any means, but most—most wives strike me as chattel. They’ve got this dull, mute, complacent expression that says they’ve forgotten how to think for themselves. They simply go about their appointed daily tasks, keeping busy, and—oh, I don’t know, maybe they’re happy. But it’s the dumb happiness of surrender. I’d rather be miserable than happy like that.”

A long stalk of meadow grass hangs from the corner of his mouth. The day after their encounter in the woods, Wilfred had a relapse—a minor one, as it turned out, but he was in bed for another week and confined to the infirmary garden for the week after that, and Elfriede begged him not to smoke any more. He protested that it was the damp weather and not the cigarette (half-smoked) that had caused the relapse, but he threw away the rest of the cigarettes anyway. Instead he chews on the meadow grass. Like a bull, she tells him. More like a steer, he corrects her, mournfully.

Now he plucks the grass from the corner of his mouth and says, “Also, I’ve always suspected their husbands don’t do much to please them in bed, these women.”