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Jean and I took the Tube back to Green Park together. She told me she was staying in Mayfair with some rich Australian friends who, several years earlier, had made their fortune in mining. “Tin, or something like that. In South America, I think. They’re out of town this weekend so I’ve the whole place to myself.”

It was getting close to dinnertime and the thought of eating alone on a Sunday evening was bothering me in a big way. Without hesitating, I asked Jean if she had plans. I figured I’d had good luck so far in the friends I’d made on this trip and Jean, my instincts told me, was someone I’d enjoy having as a pal in London.

Meeting people on this trip, I’d come to see, was not difficult. I was good at being thrown into situations with total strangers and finding a way to connect, at least temporarily. That’s what reporters do all the time. But developing a real relationship, even a temporary one, was far different from being shielded by a reporter’s notebook. Reporters, I’d come to think, were not unlike analysts: their anonymity—that is, their ability to not insert themselves into the interview—was an important element in drawing out the other person. Not that reporters shouldn’t be smart and charming and know more about the subject than the subject himself does; no, it is all a matter of not forgetting who exactly the subject of the interview is.

But meeting people on this trip, I realized—although initially easy—required going beyond the one-sided reportorial encounter. It required revealing yourself. And it also required a willingness to not be offended when the object of your attention did not respond to you. I was getting better at both aspects of the travel relationship.

Jean, however, did not reject me. She immediately said yes to my dinner offer, suggesting that we eat at a Chinese restaurant in Mayfair. We walked through Half Moon Street, ducking briefly into Shepherd Market for a quick look around, and then crossed Curzon onto Queen Street.

The restaurant, which struck me as quite chic, overflowed with fashionably-got-up people waiting to be seated. I was about to suggest we go back to an Indian restaurant in Shepherd Market when the headwaiter motioned to Jean. We left the line and followed him to a table. I was impressed.

“Did I miss something?” I asked her. “Are you some sort of celebrity or did you just slip the headwaiter a twenty-pound note?”

“Oh, it’s probably just my undeniable glamour and conspicuous charm that accounts for it.” She laughed. “Either that or my fake Gucci handbag.” She then told me that her hosts in London—who lived nearby in the Chesterfield Hill area—frequently dined at the restaurant. “I’ve been their guest here several times, so I have status. It’s one of the perks of hanging around with rich people, you know.”

Over dinner Jean and I talked about our lives; at least the Reader’s Digest versions. When she was growing up, Jean said, she dreamed of going into veterinary medicine. “I’m animal crazy and the idea of treating large animals—horses, cattle, sheep, that sort of thing—appealed to me.” She switched her focus to psychiatry after her father fell into a deep depression. She was in her teens at the time. “My father never fully recovered and somehow I was the one in the family best able to cope with him.” Her mother and sisters, she said, quickly allowed her to take over this role. She read a lot about the illness and by college was fixed in her decision to become a psychiatrist.

“It’s worked out well except I seem to be attracted only to men who have depressive tendencies. Something I don’t seem to have worked out in my own analysis.” Jean said she’d been married and divorced twice, once to and from a fellow analyst. Her month-long stay in London, she said, was prompted by the breakup of her most recent relationship. “With another analyst,” she said, letting out a mock sigh.

None of this seemed to have depressed Jean. She struck me as an outgoing,