"I'll make myself available."

"Certainly. You think he'll be okay with visitors?"

"He will. And of course I will pay you the usual consulting fee." He names a sum that is eye-poppingly large for everyone involved.

!!!!!!

Oh, he is so much more than willing now. Being a Professional Bohemian is great.

That'd keep Spring Tide Press in operation for another year.

"Oh! Quite generous of you." The amount is somewhat less eye-popping for Terrence then for anyone else. But still, academia and the occasional literary essay have never paid especially well, and he did expect to be doing this pro bono.

He should put "consulting Bohemian" on his business cards.

She and Joan can live somewhere that isn't a falling-apart boarding-house in the slums and maybe she can study full-time since that's way more than she makes pretending to tell people's futures, and Joan might be able to look for a job that's less exhausting, and-- --and she is getting ahead of herself and should not make plans that rely on large amounts of money while she doesn't know how long she's going to have this income stream for. Right.

Sal looks for information about Alexander Roby:

Dr. Aarons is taking the 10:20 a.m. train on October 30th from Paddington to Hereford.

"I'm so glad you agreed to consult with me, Mr. Jing, Mr. Markham."

"It's always a pleasure to Contribute to Society."

"I try to run my asylum in the most modern manner. In line with the latest empirical research."

"Probably for the best, I'd say. I can't say I'd want to end up in an old fashioned asylum, myself."

"Does this, uh, approach show up there? Or is this a bit of research of your own?"

"Well, I think it's part of my overall method," Dr. Aarons says earnestly. "It's always important to seek out information and understand the patient from his own point of view. Instead of assuming that everyone wants to murder their father like that hack Freud does, without paying attention when the evidence suggests no such thing."

"...I'm hoping Freud's father is still alive, seeing as he assumes that?"

Terrence laughs. "His family reunions must be uncomfortable."

"There's fascinating work that's been done with pigeons-- still unpublished, unfortunately-- you can teach them all manner of things by giving them rewards when they do what you want. Which is of course how humans learn as well! A baby babbles, and when he says something that sounds like a word, his parents smile at him and coo at him and perhaps give him the thing he wants."

"I would have expected a doctor to argue that we would be ...higher than animals."

"The immortal soul is not my area of concern, Mr. Jing. I am a man of science and I expect spirits to take care of themselves."

Terrence nods thoughtfully. "- Until they choose to present themselves for study."

"Of course. And then they shall be subject to experimentation and empiricism like anything else."

"That'd be a headline: 'Ghost Presents Itself To Asylum For Further Testing.'"

"So I've been trying to apply this to the asylum itself. We give each patient rewards for behaving in a way that lets them fit in better with society. And I've also been doing some very interesting things with classical conditioning-- more work on that has been published, you can look it up if you want to-- there's this fascinating Russian man called Pavlov--"

"Somehow I doubt all the patients' families appreciate the idea of them being rewarded." Subtly trying to feel out how Dr. Aarons feels about the Roby family? No, never.