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sat reading The Silver Cord. Her comment, when she finished, was: "I don't see why Dr. Wilbur asked you to read this. What has it got to do with you?"
    Willard Dorsett, silent while his wife and daughter talked, was mulling a few questions of his own. He had reluctantly agreed to have Sybil enter treatment because ever since Sybil had been sent home from college, Willard had known that something had to be done. And although he was by no means certain that psychiatry was the answer, he was willing to give it a chance. But now, he wondered, was the decision correct?
    The treatment, beginning on August 10, continued once a week throughout the summer and early fall of 1945. For all three Dorsetts it was a time of apprehension and watching.
    Each time Sybil came home after seeing Dr. Wilbur her parents were waiting like vultures. "What did she say about us?" they asked separately and together. "And what else did she say?" Never did they ask, "How are you getting on?" or, "How did things go?" Nor was it ever what Sybil would have liked most of all: to have them say nothing. The treatment was painful enough in itself without this constant inquisition at home.
    "You knock yourself down," the doctor told Sybil. "You don't think much of yourself. That's an uncomfortable feeling. So you project it on others and say, "They don't like me.""
    Another theme was, "You're a genius and serious. Too serious. You need more social life."
    Still another motif was: "When are you going to blow up?"
    Dr. Wilbur advised: "Get away from home. Go to New York or Chicago, where you can meet people like yourself--people who are interested in art. Get away."
    Sybil wished she could. The uneasiness she felt at home was being greatly intensified by the treatment.
    The doctor's remark about Sybil's needing more social life, for instance, had really exasperated her mother.
    "Well," her mother declared haughtily when Sybil told her about it, "what have I been saying all these years? What's wrong with my diagnosis? Why don't you spend all that money on letting me tell you what's wrong?"
    Sybil's parents, dissecting what the doctor said, also criticized the doctor herself. She smoked, and no good woman did that--no good man, for that matter. She didn't go to any church, let alone a church of their fundamentalist faith. In short, they didn't trust the doctor, and they said that they didn't. The trouble was that having always had the upper hand with their daughter, they expected also to have it now. Her mother, who saw everything in terms of black and white, simply dismissed Dr. Wilbur as being wrong. Nobody, doctor or not, who did the things of which Hattie Dorsett disapproved, according to Hattie's precepts, could be right in anything.
    Her mother's attitude toward Dr. Wilbur didn't surprise Sybil but her father's did. Sybil had thought him objective enough to be able to listen to reason, to be able to concede that Dr. Wilbur could be a good doctor even if he disapproved of her personally. Yet Sybil rapidly came to realize that her father could not overcome his resistance to everything Dr. Wilbur said or advised because her lifestyle was different from his. The doctor belonged to another world, and for Willard Dorsett, as for his wife, Dr. Wilbur would remain an outsider.
    "Dr. Wilbur doesn't really care about you," Sybil's mother repeatedly warned. "She tells you one thing now. But when she gets you where she wants you, she'll tell you altogether different things. And remember, young lady, she'll turn on you if you tell her you don't love your own mother."
    Sybil would assure her mother that she would never tell the doctor that because it wasn't true. "I do love you, Mother, I do," Sybil affirmed again and again.
    The whole situation was awful all the time. Sybil desperately wanted to get well, and the scenes at home did not help at all. Yet there was no way out. If her talking led to a scene, so too did her silence. When Sybil did not talk, her parents would