“All that time,” she told Leland, “he had been working to help me build the confidence I needed to act on my own. I’ll never be a woman of the world, but there are some things that I can do now that I couldn’t do before. I know that I could have made it here to Manitou alone. Dr. Roberts believed that I could change from what I had been to what I became. After his wife died and he took me into his confidence, I saw how deeply he believed it. He told me later that he wouldn’t have done it if he had been thinking clearly—he didn’t say so in those words. He was afraid of what it could have done to me. Anyone could have seen that he was beside himself. I did. He didn’t think about what he was doing—but I did; I couldn’t help being proud of myself.”

For the rest of the year she lived on her own, changing jobs, trading her furnished room for a larger apartment in the same building. At Christmas she sent Dr. Roberts a card and he telephoned her in return. He was giving a party and wanted her to attend. She went, and an assistant professor of physics took her home. In late January, she had another call from Dr. Roberts, who had heard that his friend was seeing her. He asked if she was all right, and she told him that she was. He had not heard from her, he said, and he wanted to be assured that there was nothing she wanted to discuss. There wasn’t. He asked her if she planned to be married. She said that she hadn’t been asked.

“Norma, I think I just called you to snoop, like any friend.”

She laughed over the telephone. “I’m friends with him, too. Just friends—loyal friends, I think. God, I hope!”

“You’ve made me feel ashamed,” he said. “Are you going to be angry with me?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“You know, last summer when my wife died and I leaned on you as I did, I lost track of what I was doing and saying. You can understand how I could worry about having impaired my usefulness to you.”

“You haven’t, Dr. Roberts.”

“Can we stay in touch? No matter what happens in the physics department. Whether I’ve lost an ex-patient or not, I’d like to gain a friend.”

She did not fail to see that he was very worried, and after she told the professor that she thought she had met the man she wanted to marry, she did not forget to call Dr. Roberts, too.