“Good, darling,” she said proudly. But when the time for her period came and the period did not, she knew with a frozen certainty what was bothering her.

Somehow the damned pill had failed, and they were trapped.

Despite her feeling of general fatigue she went sleepless and then in the morning—the syndrome of events she had wanted to avoid—she called the student health service and they gave her an appointment to come in for an examination.

The doctor’s name was Williams. He was gray-haired and paunchy and wore two cigars in his breast pocket.

Much more of a father figure than her own father, she thought. Therefore when he asked her the nature of her complaint she was able to tell him quite calmly she suspected that she was pregnant.

He had been a college doctor for nineteen years and before that had served for six years as physician at a private preparatory school for girls. In a quarter of a century he had never learned to receive this news without sympathy but he had become somewhat accustomed to it.

“Well, we’ll see,” he said.

When a drop of her urine—mixed with a drop of antiserum and then two drops of antigen—agglutinated on a glass slide in two minutes before their eyes, he was able to tell her that she was not about to become a mother.

“But my period,” she said.

“Sometimes they’re like slow trains. Wait for it and it will arrive eventually.”

She smiled at him in her silly relief and made ready to leave, but he held up his hand. “Where are you running to?”

“Doctor,” she said, “I feel so stupid. I’m one of those idiots you physicians sometimes refer to with gallantry as an over-anxious patient. I thought I’d gotten over screaming at shadows, but I guess I haven’t.”

Dr. Williams hesitated. He had seen her before on a number of occasions and he knew that what she said was true; her file on his desk in front of him was thick with the reports of imagined illnesses stretching back six years to her first term as an undergraduate.

“Tell me how else you’ve been feeling lately,” he said. “I think as long as you’re here we might as well run a few tests.”

“Well,” she said to him almost an hour later. “Can I go confess to my psychiatrist that I did it again?”

“No, you can’t,” he said. “You feel tired because you’re anemic.”

She felt a silly surge of triumph because it appeared she was after all not merely a silly neurotic.

“What must I do, eat lots of rare liver?”

“I want to do one more procedure,” he said, and handed her a johnny.

“I have to undress?”

“Please.”