When I had finished my account and he began to speak, he did not offer me any solution and he said he could not counsel me until he had seen my mother and had judged for himself whether her symptoms corresponded to my report of them. It was easy enough, he said, even for an experienced person to confuse hysteria with insanity, and while he did not say so, he implied that possibly because of my concern over Ivan, my own hysteria had made me exaggerate her eccentricities. “She is perhaps best off at home,” he said, “where she can be guarded against excitement. If, that is, she’s curable, and the chances are that she is.”

“But where else could she be?”

“Perhaps I have misunderstood you.” He looked away from me and briefly examined the scene from his window as though he were trying to integrate all its essentials, its colors and its forms, as if he hoped to find there the way to put his words best. “That is, I assumed in your coming to me that you wanted more than a listener. I thought you had been debating whether or not to send her to an asylum.”

Chiefly, I suppose, because there was none near Chichester and I had, therefore, no actual impression of the appearance of such an establishment, an asylum had never once occurred to me. My mother’s madness had been clearly separated from any other madness. And I said to Dr. McAllister. “Oh, but she isn’t violent! She couldn’t be put into a strait-jacket.”

He laughed. “You’re behind the times. We’re not going to put your mother into a strait-jacket. Why, mental hospitals are no worse than this these days.” He motioned toward the silent corridor. “But we needn’t talk about that any more. I’ll look around some evening soon, as though I were paying a call on you, and see what’s what.” He glanced down at the blue card on which he had been making notes, to refresh his memory of my name. “We’ve covered everything now, haven’t we, Miss Marburg? I would like, though, to ask you one more question. Why was it you used Miss Pride’s name instead of another? You know, you could have said Dr. Brunson sent you.”

“She spoke of you to me. I connected your name with her and with her niece, for she said you were friends. You see, last February, when my brother died, Miss Pride came to see me and took me into Boston. I had tea with her . . . in the library.” I had heard no more from her. She did not come to fetch me to see the Public Gardens, as she had promised, nor had she sent me the box of books although The Atlantic Monthly came regularly. Boston had receded a little farther each day until now, the sea again seemed the only road to the State House whose glittering dome had once more recovered its pure shape after my new impressions of it had shuffled off into the past. I had thought my afternoon with Miss Pride was engraved indelibly on my mind, but at last I remembered clearly only the horny black trunks of the trees in the Park Street cemetery, only the names Franklin and Revere, and only the metallic voice of the girl saying “Auntie?”