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experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly knowing had yielded to the infinitely greater terror of knowing precisely. The pajamas and the black and white drawing left no doubt.
    Sybil gulped the milk, pushed the soup aside, hastily put on her shoes, her still-wet coat, her scarf, mittens. She stuffed the pajamas and sales slip into her zipper folder. She had planned to spend the night, but suddenly, even though she could see that the snow hadn't stopped and she knew that the trains might be delayed, she had to get back to New York to avoid the risk of what might happen if she stayed.
    Sybil Isabel Dorsett knew that she had to get back to New York while she was still herself.

2
    Wartime Within
     
    Trains.
    These dragons in the night fascinated Sybil, thrilled her and held her entranced. In the past they had usually meant escape. This train, however, was taking her not away from but toward. And she knew that she had to get back to New York not because of the chemistry lab and her other classes but because of Dr. Wilbur.
    Sybil tried to envision what had taken place in her absence: the regular daily session with the doctor missed, the doctor's possible attempts to search for her, and above all the doctor's disappointment upon surmising what had probably happened.
    Then Sybil dismissed these disturbing thoughts. The mood of calm that had come over her since boarding the train was too pleasant to lose in idle speculation, remorse, self-recrimination.
    Sybil Isabel Dorsett thought instead of the very first time she had seen Dr. Wilbur and of the events that surrounded that meeting. Unleashed was a flood of recollections so powerful that not until the train pulled into New York's Pennsylvania Station did it cease.
     
    Sybil was twenty-two years old. Adrift in her feelings, she was living in despair with her parents--Willard and Henrietta "Hattie" Dorsett--that summer of 1945. Wartime without, it was for Sybil also wartime within. Hers was not a war of nerves in the customary sense but a war of nervousness in a special sense, for the nervous symptoms that had plagued her since childhood had become so bad at the midwestern teachers' college where she had been majoring in art that the college authorities had sent her home the previous June, saying that not until a psychiatrist deemed her fit could she return. Gwen Updyke, the college nurse, afraid to let her travel alone, had made the trip with her. But homecoming, which took Sybil from an unmanageable academic career to an even more unmanageable relationship with her parents, who were at once overprotective and unsympathetic, had served only to aggravate her symptoms. in August, 1945, Sybil was earnestly seeking a solution to a problem that had been a lifetime dilemma but that neither she nor anybody else understood.
    In this state of mind Sybil had made her first trip to see Dr. Lynn Thompson Hall, her mother's doctor. That time it had been her mother who had been the sick one, with a swollen belly, and Sybil had come to the office as the daughter of the patient. But while talking to Dr. Hall about her mother, Sybil had experienced a fleeting wish that he would ask about her. She liked the tall, soft-spoken Dr. Hall, and she realized that what she liked most about him was that he treated her like an intelligent adult. The very realization, however, was disquieting. Being twenty-two entitled her to adult status. Having an IQ of 170, according to a standard intelligence test, should have earned her the right to be treated as if she were intelligent. Yet she never felt like an intelligent adult around her mother or even around her father. Her parents were forty when she was born; she had never known her mother without gray hair. She supposed that it was this Isaac-Jacob setting, with a generation gap spanning not one but two