“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “It was too early for medicine when I left Port Smith. In the morning all I can eat is a breakfast-type breakfast.” She took the capsule with a swallow of water. “One of these days I’m going to be a woman of the world.” She dropped the bottle into her purse and snapped the clasp shut. “I guess I had the toughest judge in Port Smith. ‘Young lady,’” she mimed, deepening her voice, “‘for the life of me I can’t see what happened to you, but I’ve been told that you’ll respond better to treatment than you will to jail. Would you be willing to see a doctor?’ I said yes before I realized that he meant a psychiatrist. Then he explained what probation was and what violation of it would mean—I would have to serve a full sentence, ninety days, with nothing off for the probation time I had put in. Talk about mixed emotions. I hadn’t realized that I had sunk so low in the opinion of society. I was that close to jail. I knew I needed help, but I didn’t think I was sick. I didn’t want it put down on the record. I wanted to tell him to shut up, all I had done was break a mirror—just over seven years ago, by the way. You’re supposed to have seven years’ bad luck, but they don’t tell you which seven. My luck for seven years was nothing but good. I wanted to tell him I’d rather go to jail than be humiliated by what he was saying. But he could send me to jail and say what he pleased, anyway. So he assigned me to a probation officer.”

She went to the probation officer, a woman, and arrangements were made with a psychiatric clinic for an interview. The interviewers were oily and patronizing; her fees were adjusted to her ability to pay. She had no voice in the decision. Finally when she was dropped into Wendell Roberts’ office, in her anger she said, “This shits. I should have gone to jail.”

“That can be arranged,” he said, and reached for the telephone.

“Don’t!” she cried.

From her salary, sixty dollars a week, the clinic took twenty, and from her free time, two evenings, then three, every week. In six months she was registered again in Port Smith College, and all her evenings were filled. She continued to see men, many of them, whenever she could. If anything, Dr. Roberts encouraged her to go out. She would come in on a Monday evening with a tale of spending Saturday night and Sunday sleeping with a fellow in her history class.

“Do you want to tell me how it was?”

“It was all right,” she said.

“No better than that?”

“You have to get used to a person.”

“Did you get used to him?”