“Drastic? Why, she would never harm a hair of my head.”

And he replied, “Certainly not,” but his tone was so positive that paradoxically it was suspicious and a week later, when I went to the hospital to see him, I said, “The other day when you said my mother would never do anything ‘drastic’ to me, did you mean it?”

“I knew you would be troubled by that and I regret I said it. But the fact is that insane people—and mind you, I’m not saying she’s insane—can turn against anything if they feel they’re driven to a wall. For instance, when your mother discovers that you lock her in, she may be furious. That’s why we must decide about the asylum soon because you won’t be able to deceive her indefinitely. And that’s why—that and because even suicide is not an impossibility—you’d better get rid of anything she might use against you or against herself, knives and so on.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Why, now she’s not much different from what she’s been for years. Now that she’s started to speak English again.”

“I don’t doubt that. But has it ever occurred to you that for years you have been in exactly the same danger that you are now? You don’t think, do you, that this has come on her overnight?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I guess I’ve known it for a long time. I always just thought she was queer and never was afraid until that night Dr. Galbraith came.”

I could hardly bear to be in the room with her, not because I was afraid of what she might do to me, for, despite the doctor’s ominous warning I remained convinced that, as I had told him, she would not “harm a hair of my head,” but because she trusted me and did not know that at any moment I might lock her up behind high walls whose corridors rang with maniacal laughter and groans of the hopeless damned souls of this hell on earth. And when Dr. McAllister one day gave the place, which hitherto had existed in my mind merely as the word “asylum,” a name and said we would send her to Wolfburg, it seemed to me that evening that she must be able to read my mind, obsessed with its hypocrisy. For heretofore the asylum had been as remote in space as her admittance there had been in time. But the articulation of the name and, further, the articulation of one that was not unfamiliar to me, forced me to open my eyes to its masonry, its approach, its gates, for this was a tangible destination. Thus, we could no longer use the conventional formula, “if she is taken somewhere,” but now must say, “if she is taken to Wolfburg.” Moreover, Dr. McAllister had this time used the active rather than the passive voice, had said, “We will take her,” not “She will be taken,” making personal the escort which had formerly been an abstract force. The doctor said, “Wolfburg has beautiful gardens, kept by some of the inmates.” I wondered that he, in his kindness, should have built me so cruelly real a picture, going even so far as to name a particular feature of the lunatics’ industry, an herb garden rivaling the famous one in Concord. But his intention was not tactless; it was just because of his frequent references to Wolfburg in the weeks that followed that I was able, when I first saw it, to enter the gate with composure and to admire that very horticulture, the first mention of which had unnerved me.