All the day I was thinking the word “insane.” In telling my mother that morning of the daily life of the Brunsons, I had recalled a recent conversation between the dentist and Dr. Roberts, the only other physician of the town besides Dr. Galbraith. The doctor had just been reading of new surgery which was now employed in some cases of insanity. “The cure, to my way of thinking, is as bad as the disease. To be sure, they don’t take after you with butcher knives and so on, but they become inhuman, have no feelings. The optic thalamus is put out of whack. Tell them somebody died and they’ll laugh their heads off. Tell them a rattlesnake is behind their chair and they’ll just grin. I’m an old-fashioned man. I believe in the good old-fashioned insane asylum.” Mrs. Brunson who, when she had had too much to drink, tried always to ask intelligent questions—perhaps to prove that she could still follow the talk even though she could not hold her fork in her hand and spilled water in her lap as she lifted her glass to her lips—said, “But that would be used only for violent cases, wouldn’t it? Not for the people that just say strange things and think they see pink elephants and so on?” The doctor, a man who in all things saw black or white, replied shortly, “I may be wrong, but personally, I think people who see pink elephants—unless they’re stuffing you—are insane. We all have our off moments, but I don’t think a healthy mind is ever off enough to see a pink elephant.”

Had my mother actually seen the birds last night, I asked myself, or was she only teasing me? Perhaps it was the fever that had made her talk so strangely, so much more strangely on reflecting today than it had seemed last night. Moreover, I wondered why she had forgotten the mountain air and the pine trees in the Adirondacks this morning when she had been so enraptured at the thought of them last night. I did not want her to go! I was sure she did not need mountain air—the doctor himself, at the beginning of her illness, had told me that the idea that climate had anything to do with pulmonary diseases was nonsense—and I believed that on the contrary what she needed most, and what she would always need, was my pampering, for she was a very young child. And while I pitied Dr. Galbraith, I was not willing to sacrifice my mother to his loneliness, not even in the memory of his devout French Madeleine. Nor, on the other hand, was I any more willing to sacrifice him, poor gallant goose, to the persecutions to which Mamma had subjected my father.