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accuse her of being moody, and although they had upbraided her with this characteristic many times in the past, they now claimed that Dr. Wilbur was responsible for the moodiness. "She'll make you crazy," her mother warned, "and then they'll put you in an institution because that's the way doctors make their money."
    In contrast, outsiders, people who knew she was seeing the doctor and people who didn't, talked of a marked improvement in Sybil. But when people said these things, her mother scoffed, and her father only partly listened. Sybil felt that he might have understood if his wife hadn't brainwashed him with her "She's better because she's growing up, and everybody gets more sense when they grow older and understand things better." Sybil was twenty-two, but her mother talked of that period of her life as a time not of maturity but of first growing up.
    At least, the brainwashing had no effect upon Sybil herself. As the weekly one-hour sessions with the doctor in Omaha continued through September, Sybil became more and more convinced that Dr. Wilbur would help her to get well.
    But she was still very puzzled by herself. Sybil had not told the doctor about what puzzled her--some terrible, nameless thing having to do with time and memory. There had been times, for instance, during the last summer and early autumn, when Sybil had gone to the doctor's office without, later, having any clear recollection of what had transpired. There were times when she remembered entering the elevator, but not the office; other times when she remembered coming into the office, but not leaving it. Those were the times when Sybil could not tell her parents what the doctor had said about them or about anything else. Sybil had not known whether she had even seen the doctor.
    One time in particular stood out in memory. A paradox, a joke: remembering what you didn't remember.
    Sybil heard herself saying, "It wasn't as bad as usual."
    "How do you know?" the doctor asked.
    "I would have been out in the hall or something by now," Sybil replied.
    "Well," said the doctor, "you almost jumped out of the window. You jumped out of the chair and rushed to the window. I couldn't stop you."
    Sybil didn't remember doing anything of the sort, but she hadn't argued the point. All her life people had said that she had done things she hadn't done. She let it go in Dr. Wilbur's office, as she always had.
    "I wasn't really disturbed," the doctor explained. "You can't get out of these windows. It's because of the kind of glass. Unbreakable, you know."
    Then Dr. Wilbur became more serious. "You had what looked like a little seizure," she said. "It wasn't epilepsy; it was a psychological seizure."
    Psychological? The doctor was saying that Sybil was nervous. That was old--not new. What was new, however, was that the doctor didn't seem to blame her. In the past, when these things had happened, she had always blamed herself. Nobody else knew about them, but she had been certain that anybody who had known would have found her guilty of inexcusable behavior.
    Nor did Dr. Wilbur seem to think that her condition was hopeless, as she herself had often feared. The doctor presented her with three choices for the immediate future: to teach at the junior high school for another year; to go back to college; or to undergo intensified treatment at the Bishop Clarkson Memorial Hospital, where the doctor and a colleague ran a psychiatric division.
    Sybil chose the hospital. But when she told her parents, they were distressed, even terrified. To them hospitalization meant only one thing: their daughter was insane.
    "This has nothing to do with insanity," Sybil tried to explain. "Dr. Wilbur told me it didn't."
    "Then it has to do with the devil," her father replied ominously.
    "Clarkson, Parkson," her mother rhymed. "Park son, park daughter."
    Even though the hospital seemed the road to damnation, Willard Dorsett agreed to talk it over with Dr. Wilbur, choosing to meet her not at her