"Actually she's quite settled in, and she seems to be getting over such peculiar ideas. Glass--your pardon, the town mortician--even gave her a gift of a book."

"Oh? You have a most welcoming and inclusive community indeed. I must wonder, is it a result of your settlement's rather unusual success? Or was it the cause?" I muse silently for a moment, ignoring the throbbing in my head. "There are certainly many benefits to heterogeneity, but... one might wonder if such a policy is always wise. Many seeds grow in fertile and untended ground, and not all of them are benign."

"I do wish that there were not places still promoting such ideas, but I suppose there will always be those who presume to deny knowledge to others."

Now that would smart, if my life wasn't already one continuous succession of lies. And truths that might as well be lies. "Oh yes." I shake my head. "I've known the sort."

Something nags at me from what he said before, and I sift back through it to pick out the name. Glass. It's an unusual name, one I've only encountered once before. Could it be the same person? How far am I willing to stretch the bounds of coincidence? "Your mortician, this... Glass." I furrow my brow, sorting through all I can remember of the person I shared the road with for a time. "A woman? With an extensive folk knowledge of herbs?"

"Well, there is something to the truism that confession is good for the soul; at the very least, people do like talk about themselves. I imagine that is a great help in your work."

"Wherever any group of people comes together, there is an economy of confidences. Investment. Transaction. Exchange. Depreciation. Dividends." I close my eyes for the briefest of moments, to relieve the pressure behind them. "Maybe even as a species, we aren't so much defined by having secrets as by the need to tell them. Some--even most-- people want to stand revealed, sometime." Often not to me, but to someone I can reach.

Even I'm not immune to this urge. Without someone else to see you, sometimes you feel like you're nothing but smoke. A play of light across a reflective surface. Of course, it isn't as though I can have people who know my secrets just out roaming free. You have to take steps.

"The ones that don't, well..." I make a dismissive gesture with one hand. "They often have a way, unconscious or not, of alerting me to the very people they'd rather I didn't speak to. A perversity of human nature. Everyone has someone's secrets to barter."

I've left the hapless monk persona in bed, it would seem. It's all right. I expect he would have bored Mr. Sagert to tears. He's no small study himself.

I give a friendly smile. "In the end, though, it boils down to this: for the purposes of my work, I'm not interested in 'who' people are, only in 'what' they are. What they represent in the greater order of things. I'm discreet, I don't share what I've learned, and I'm never around long enough to threaten anybody's reputation."

Technically true, though hardly the whole picture. Occasionally reputations are the least of their worries.

"There was an alienist in town for a time, but I believe he has moved on. Are you sure you wouldn't care for more tea?"

"You've gone to more than enough trouble." The timing makes me wonder if he's recognized that I'm in pain. I would be irritated at showing weakness of any sort, but I keep my tone casual. "I don't drink tea very often, and sometimes it affects me adversely."

"Anyway. An alienist? Very quaint." The psychiatric profession is not one I'm particularly friendly toward. If ever there was a field where knowledge was inextricable from the modes of being that produced it. "If he hadn't moved on, no doubt I could have learned something. Though mostly the wrong sort of thing. Not exactly a big-picture profession."