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runs his hand along the bark of a tree. “My mother had a gardener whose sole task it was to tend to the trees. Personally, I preferred the blossoms to the oranges; the scent would linger in the stairwell. Many was the Sunday I sat in this dome finishing my schoolwork or reading—or, more likely, gazing out at the rooftops through the trees and trying to imagine a future.”
    “I like thinking of you as a boy,” Stella says, aware that she is incapable of thinking of herself as a girl.
    Dr. Bridge sits at one end of the divan and gestures for Stella to take a seat at the other end, so that they can face each other. “Thank you for seeing me today.” Stella has agreed to the proposal Lily and Dr. Bridge made the day after Stella returned from the Admiralty. Stella would stay with the Bridges for a time while Dr. Bridge tried to diagnose and help her. Stella would work at the settlement house with Lily, and in return Stella would allow Lily to accompany her in the motorcar on her visits to the Admiralty so that she would not compromise her recovery from pneumonia.
    She smoothes the skirt of her navy dress. Dr. Bridge has on a suit appropriate to his profession, though she wonders how it can be possible to have a spotless white shirt after having completed a surgery. In France, Stella never saw doctors in suits. They wore either uniforms or white aprons, which were never clean.
    “How are you feeling?” Dr. Bridge asks.
    “Better. I feel stronger each day. Why do you want to help me?”
    The doctor frowns slightly. “During our first lunch together, I learned that you have debilitating pains in your legs, that you sometimes go deaf, and that you have lost your memory. At first I thought your symptoms merely physical, but I have begun to wonder if they don’t in some way represent an injury in your mind. In the time since, I have made several inquiries among psychologists and psychiatrists as to your symptoms, and I have received the same reply each time. The common thought is that you are suffering from hysteria, but no psychologist or psychiatrist in London can take on female patients at this time. All are treating men who have returned from the front, or else they are serving on military medical boards. I am very sorry to have to tell you this.”
    Again, Stella is assailed by a powerful feeling that the solution to her problem lies at the Admiralty.
    Dr. Bridge puts his hands together. “I may be able to aid you in recovering your memory.”
    “How?”
    “As one colleague explained it to me, talk therapy has been effective in curing patients of their short-term ailments. We discussed the practice for some time, and he felt you and I might try it.”
    “And how would that be?”
    “You talk, I listen.”
    Stella cannot help but laugh. “It seems awfully self-conscious.”
    “Well, yes,” Dr. Bridge says. “But that’s a hurdle we shall have to get beyond.”
    A sharp glint of sun lights up Dr. Bridge’s spectacles, and he squints. He moves his head away. “I do believe that talking about what has happened to you may have some benefit. Sometimes it’s necessary to speak of the worst in order to be cured.”
    “I wish I could go to your clinic and have my brain repaired.”
    “I don’t think that can be what you want.”
    “Your job must be terrible at times,” she says.
    He shrugs. “It’s my work. I find tremendous satisfaction in making an injured man well. Usually, I do it with a scalpel.”
    “I feel as though you are sharpening your scalpel for me.”
    “Do you?” he asks.
    “You want to make me well.”
    “But with words, Miss Bain.”
    “Please call me Stella.”
    “Thank you. I’d invite you to call me August, but given the circumstances, I should remain as Dr. Bridge.”
    Stella ponders this. “Well, then, Dr. Bridge, I have something that I must tell you. This is difficult.”
    “I imagine every bit of this is hard for you.”
    “I’m convinced I did something unforgivable in