“She’s talking in Russian. She does that when she’s upset.”

“My God!” He strode in fury out the door and I followed him. “Well?”

“My mother has always been a little strange, Dr. Galbraith,” I said, “ever since my father went away. Even before that I guess.” He stood with his arms at the sides of his long gray tweed coat. He was staring bleakly at the barnyard scene above the table. “Dr. Galbraith,” I went on, “there is no way I can pay you. I’m very grateful, really.”

“I had never considered a fee. A doctor assumes responsibility for a patient without thinking of the money,” he said impatiently.

“I’m so sorry about it all, sir! You see, I think my mother is insane.”

It was the first time I had said the word aloud and it shocked me almost as much as it did him. He stared at me, absorbing the words after the sound was gone. “Insane?” he repeated. “Why, of course she is insane, but, I must confess, she hides her symptoms well. I swear, Miss Marburg, I had no proof of it until tonight.”

“What shall I do?” I asked him, for it was natural for me to appeal to him since he shared my knowledge. His expression changed from disgraced rage to anxiety. “Come to my office tomorrow afternoon,” he said, “and we’ll discuss it. She shouldn’t hear us, you know, in her excitable state. Tomorrow, promptly at four.” He hurried out, businesslike, professional, hiding beneath his manner the relief he must have felt in knowing that my mother had not “rejected” him since she was incapable of doing so.

When I had heard his car drive away and I went in to her, I saw the marks of her real madness in her glazed eyes that looked at me without recognition and did not move as I moved but continued to focus in the place I had just quit, and in her rigid pose which broke only when she tore the petals languidly from the doctor’s flowers, and in the steady monologue in Russian that ended at last in a fitful sleep. And when, in the morning, there was no change in her and she would not eat, but pushed the tray aside, spilling the tea on the counterpane and watching it spread, I thought there was no hope. “Mamma?” I tested her, but she would not look up. I should perhaps stay with her, I thought, lest she conceive some devilish desire to hurt herself or to wander to the village in her nightdress. But because she was no longer recognizable as my mother, but was only an inhuman parody of her, I was frightened and did not want to remain in the house. A little faint, because I could not eat my breakfast, I took up my schoolbooks, locked the door behind me and started down the road.