"Well, it's not their business, is it? My duty is to the patient and to society."

Terrence is not particularly thinking about the implications of the Roby case. He is nodding and making appropriate "hm!" and "oh? go on" noises to indicate interest in receiving an infodump about classical conditioning.

"Fascinating! Speaking of empiricism, you know, a lot of classic texts just straightforwardly assume that gods and spirits and such were obviously real and had meaningful impacts in their lives. Pagan or otherwise - you see things that look a great deal like empiricism, court trials where people earnestly debated whether the spells they cast were ungodly magic or legitimate philosophy." He says the last clause with air quotes applied heavily. "Of course, I have no idea what to make of it. but it is very curious indeed."

"Well, there are all manner of superstitions in the past. Today we know that magic spells do not work."

"Certainly! Certainly."

"I don't care about philosophy," Dr. Aarons says. "I care about healing the insane. Speaking of, we've done fascinating things with classically conditioning the patients by putting them in a situation that naturally elicits a certain emotion and then associating it with something we'd prefer to cause that emotion in the future. I've even tried it with calming medications, causing the patient to associate a calm state with a previous target of a phobia--"

"I think you may find you care about philosophy more than you think! But as a means to the end. Quite commendable, certainly."

Eyes emoji @ these facts.

MHHMM. Calming medications. Splendid idea. (One of the nice things about theatrical training is that it has given him a very good poker face.)

Do you want to hear about BEHAVIORISM. Because Leo has thoughts on BEHAVIORISM. And absolutely no thoughts on any other subject.

...you know what? Behaviourism isn't the King in Yellow, so Jing Yi has no grounds to complain.

As it happens, The King in Yellow does have some interesting ideas in regards to this - but it's quite subtextually nuanced and Terrence doesn't think the train ride will be long enough to really catch Leo up on the relevant elements. ... Also, he's not uninterested in this behaviorism philosophy, so, yeah, he wants to hear Leo's thoughts.

Meanwhile--

Trains: very fast. She's not really used to them?

There is probably an Etiquette for this but she has no idea what it is.

Well, she's not going to pick up any Etiquette from these weirdos.

"You're at the library a lot," Sal says to her eventually. It's more words than he's ever said to her before.

"I-- really like reading?" Wait no that wasn't supposed to be a question. "I hang around bookshops too, I think I've seen you at Mr. Latz's shop."

He has definitely tried to get Inaaya to stop calling him that, but it doesn't take.

"There too, yes. What do you read about?"

"Math! And recently I've been going through the astronomy shelves but mostly math. And of course I'm working my way through everything Bertrand Russell has ever written math or otherwise."

"Much more practical than all of this talk of murder and insanity. What are you planning to go into?"

Well, she's been trying to figure out how to get Joan to be able to visit the Dreamlands, but that's not an answer to a question about career aspirations, now is it.

"I'm hoping to get a math paper published soon," she says, even though this is a ridiculous thing to hope for when you're a teenage girl with an Indian name who reads tarot cards for a living.

"She definitely is," Oscar interjects. Inaaya is the real thing!

"...well, I definitely am hoping, journals tend to want you to be university-affiliated. Which I'm... not."

"That's gatekeeping bullshit... Sorry Inaaya, I promised you I wouldn't start with the rant against academia. It's purely their loss, though."

"Credentialism is a sad fact of life. Maybe you can find someone to work with you. Or once you get through college you'll have years of polishing it up." If she's got anything at all, which is maybe possible, but let's be very honest here, Oscar Latz is not qualified to assess that. "What's your paper about?"

"Sad facts of life" are how you excuse most forms of historically contingent exploitation but we're not getting into that.

Inaaya can explain her paper! It's building on these three theorems one of which was published last year and--

Weobley lies twenty miles northwest of the county town of Hereford and twenty east of the Welsh border. It is primarily a farming community with Hereford beef cattle, dairy cattle, cider apple orchards, and wheat fields. The village has a farm supply company, a post office/general store and two pubs, the Wheatsheaf and the Red Lion.

St. Agnes’ Asylum itself sits on a hill a mile east of the village. It is reached by an unpaved, rutted track running between broad dry-stone walls. The main building is a longish, three-story, gray brick building with barred windows and a steep slate roof. Beside that stands an administration building similar in appearance but smaller and without bars on the windows. The two structures sit on a hillside bare of tree and bush — like a pointless and lonely fortification. The madhouse attendants gaze sullenly at the investigators as they walk from the car.