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Wilbur nodded as she lit a cigarette.
    "They worry about me," Sybil continued. "Everyone worries about me--my friends, our pastor, everybody. I'm illustrating the pastor's lyceums on Daniel and Revelation. As he talks, I paint the beast about which he's talking. It's really very impressive. I'm suspended on a scaffold ten feet above the stage. I usually chalk on heavy drawing paper my interpretations of what the pastor says. He's keeping me busy. He ..."
    "How do you feel? Dr. Wilbur interrupted. "You've been telling me what everybody else thinks about you. But how do you feel?"
    A compendium of physical complaints followed as Sybil talked of her poor appetite, of weighing only 79 pounds even though she was five-feet-five. The recital also included her chronic sinusitis and her poor eyesight, so poor that, as she put it, "I sometimes feel as if I'm looking through a tunnel." After a pause she added, "I'm not at all well, but I've been told I'm really healthy. Ever since I was a little girl, I've been sick but not sick."
    Did she remember her dreams? the doctor wanted to know. No, she didn't remember them. As a little girl she had nightmares, which she didn't remember, either.
    Sybil froze when the doctor tried to get her to talk about her feelings, but the doctor persisted. Finally Sybil had said enough for the doctor to be able to tell her: "You should come back. You have difficulties that can be worked on." Of that Dr. Wilbur was sure, but she also knew that it would not be easy to reach Sybil.
     
    She was so naive, so unworldly, so immature. Too, she worked against herself, using a lot of words without saying much.
    Sybil herself wished earnestly that she could come back, but standing in the outer office, paying the receptionist, she knew that she couldn't make another appointment without first talking it over with her parents. Still, she felt that, if she continued to work with the doctor, she would get well.
    Had she told the doctor too much? Sybil wondered as the elevator went swiftly down the six floors of the Medical Arts Building. Quickly she reassured herself that what she didn't dare tell had not been told. Then, walking out of the building into the glare of the August sun, she realized that she would never be able to tell Dr. Wilbur all that she should and could about herself. All that she, Sybil Isabel Dorsett, knew-- even then.

3
    The Couch and the Serpent
     
    Sybil made her second visit to Dr. Wilbur without incident. When the patient stepped out of the Medical Arts Building, however, she remembered that her mother was waiting in Brandeis department store on the adjacent block. Frustrated at being unable to accompany her daughter to the doctor's office, Hattie Dorsett had taken her as far as the elevators of the building in which the office was located.
    "I'll wait for you in Brandeis," Hattie had said at the elevator door, making a promise of the statement, the old refrain of an enforced interdependency from which neither had been able, even if both had been willing --and certainly Hattie was not--to extricate herself. Now, as always, it was a strange case of "Wherever thou goest, I shall go."
    Slowly, dutifully, Sybil walked into Brandeis department store, where, visible almost at once, were her mother's lean figure, proud carriage, white hair. At once, too, came her mother's "What did the doctor say about me?" Although it was a question, it had the ring of a demand.
    "She didn't say anything," Sybil replied.
    "Well, let's go," her mother said testily. "I'd like to stop at the library," Sybil remarked.
    "Oh, all right," her mother agreed. "I want a book myself."
    At the library on Harney Street Sybil and her mother went to different shelves and then met at the checkout desk. Sybil was holding Sidney Howard's The Silver Cord.
    "What's that?" her mother asked. "It's a play," Sybil replied. "Dr. Wilbur suggested that I read it."
    That evening, while Sybil prepared dinner and, later, did the dishes, her mother