"Maybe she was propositioning you."

"Propositioning in the way only someone in an asylum would think to."

Man Jing Yi never makes this easy.

"Unthinkable, I'm a married man."

"Oh, she did know that, didn't she? Hmm. Well then." He shrugs.

"If it's the German one, it's just a research institute. Extremely progressive."

"Huh, you could have fooled me with that name. I'll have to look into their work, though sociology's a bit outside my field. Lovely woman, though."

As Nurse Price escorts them to Mr. Roby, a nurse stops in his business and, staring at the strangers, starts to ask Nurse Price a question. “Not now, Edwards,” interrupts the nurse and walks by, leaving the man looking at the backs of the group.

Hmm. Workplace tension, or a patient working as a 'reward': hard to tell.

Whomst!!!

The sound of footsteps and muted sobbing echoes back off bare stone corridors as Price leads them to Roby’s room.

Roby is dressed in a white canvas tunic and trousers. The room is tiny, dim, and chilly. There is a bed, table, and two chairs, and no possessions except for a stack of a dozen or so books on the table. A barred window gives a view of the sky.

Roby looks up. "Nigel?"

Roby is very good-looking.

How tragic, then, that he is imprisoned.

Or that they weren't better friends a few years ago.

"Not Nigel. Sorry."

"My name is Oscar Latz. Doctor Aarons discussed why we're here, right?"

Roby sits hunched over looking down in his lap.

This may require a gentler touch, a less direct approach. He very deliberately looks at the pile of books. "Read anything good lately?"

The books are all poetry. They include From Our Ghostly Enemy by Robert Graves; The Freaks: An Idyll of Suburbia by Pinero; Poems 1918-1921 by Ezra Pound; and Collected Poems and The Man Who Died Twice both by Edward Arlington Robinson.

Roby doesn't answer.

Beautiful and with interesting taste. Oh, what a pity. (Not that he won't leave him here if it seems for the best.)

"Ezra Pound, huh. I love that volume, real shame about the politics."

Roby's manner of speech is odd: the cadence is slow and irregular. “Being locked in this room is inconvenient. It means I cannot finish my work and so I cannot go where I would like to go."

"...what work is it that you can't finish?"

Oscar's trying to work out whether Roby's on something during the day too. He wouldn't put it past them honestly.

"You know, few writers have the ability to write honestly. Truths are used for entertainment only. That is a strange concept. Such a writer is like a man whose only concern is to hide his ignorance... willful misinterpretation, a shut mind, closed eyes, a tight mouth, and balled fists. It’s not enough to have the ability. You must be brave enough to use that ability, bring your intellect to bear like a light in the darkness, like a sane man in a world of madmen.” He smiles ruefully to himself and is quiet.

"Your work is your writing?" Let's see if that redirects him to something less abstract.

Roby has decided that instead he's going to stare into space.