I felt that if I moved from the counter where I rested my elbows, I would fall in my weakness. An interne who had been watching me absent-mindedly as he whirled a piece of rubber tubing round and round, pocketed his plaything and stepped to my side. Out of a mechanical kindness, he placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Take it easy.” I burst into tears, inexplicable to myself, and stumbled through the sunlit lobby, my legs enfeebled, my mind a blank. The scene detached itself from its aseptic smell and the white entourage of nurses and internes: its properties receded and I, hurtling up the road, was too alone to measure the degree of my loneliness, for I did not know where to turn for advice.

Yet, on the day following the doctor’s funeral in Cambridge, I was receiving counsel from young Dr. McAllister in the same office where I had first seen Dr. Galbraith. That other day, the hygienic glare of gray walls and white wainscoting had combined with the blue shadows of snow-filled trees beyond the windows into a hard, glacial light. The old man’s skin had been green as if its natural yellow hue had been mixed with the blue shadows, and his eyes, pillowed by their pendulous sacs, had ambled sensually over me while his addled brain danced in bewilderment. The tall, bony elms of the hospital courtyard had whined and rattled and then, when the wind died, a company of discursive sparrows raised their voices in the hush. The only other sign of animation to be seen from the window was a solitary pigeon promenading over the slate roof of an adjacent ward about whose red chimney wound the steam from two small exhausts.

The new occupant sat before the open windows through which, gentle and billowing, came the May day’s limbering breezes and edgeless light. The world beyond was spacious and subtly illuminated; the landscape, perhaps as much as the young doctor’s adroit kindness, loosed the strictures of my terror, and after my first ferocious declaration that my mother was insane, I was able to speak without a stutter.

Dr. McAllister was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty; he was spare and angular and erect and his obvious good health recommended him, whereas Dr. Galbraith’s diseased complexion and unstrung manner had made him seem, from the very beginning, an uncertain ally. The tone of the young man’s voice was restorative, for he was at once casual so that my story seemed automatically less calamitous than I had thought, and authoritative so that I knew I could depend upon him.