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Some doctor!

Some cure!

And some models the doctor was obliged to choose in determining how much guilt and pity Mrs. Z might safely be allowed to feel! The models were persons with reputations for being normal. The therapist, after a deeply upsetting investigation of normality at this time and place, was bound to conclude that a normal person, functioning well on the upper levels of a prosperous, industrialized society, can hardly hear his conscience at all.

So a logical person might conclude that I have been guilty of balderdash in announcing a new disease, samaritrophia, when it is virtually as common among healthy Americans as noses, say. I defend myself in this manner: samaritrophia is only a disease, and a violent one, too, when it attacks those exceedingly rare individuals who reach biological maturity still loving and wanting to help their fellow men.

I have treated only one case. I have never heard of anyone's treating another. In looking about myself, I can see only one other person who has the potential for a samaritrophic collapse. That person, of course, is Mr. Z. And so deep is his commitment to compassion, that, were he to come down with samaritrophia, I sense that he would kill himself, or perhaps kill a hundred others and then be shot down like a mad dog, before we could treat him.

Treat, treat, treat.

Some treat!

Mrs. Z, having been treated and cured in our health emporium, expressed a wish to, "... go out and have some fun for a change, to live it up ..." before her looks were gone. Her looks were still staggeringly attractive, were marked by lines of affection unlimited, which she no longer deserved.

She wanted nothing more to do with Hometown or Mr. Z, announced that she was off to the gaiety of Paris, and to merry old friends there. She wished to buy new clothes, she said, and to dance and dance and dance until she fainted in the arms of a tall, dark stranger, into the arms, hopefully, of a double spy.

She often referred to her husband as, "My dirty, drunk uncle down South," although never to his face. She was not a schizophrenic, but, whenever her husband visited her, which he did three times a week, she manifested all of the sick cutenesses of paranoia. Shades of Clara Bow! She would pluck his cheek, coax kisses from him, kisses she gigglingly declined to receive. She told him she wanted to go to Paris for just a little while, to see her dear family, and that she would be back before he knew it. She wanted him to say farewell and give her love to all her dear, underprivileged friends in Hometown.

Mr. Z was not deceived. He saw her off to Paris at the Indianapolis Airport, and he told me when the plane was a speck in the sky that he would never see her again. "She certainly looked happy," he said to me. "She certainly will have a good time when she gets back there with the kind of company she deserves."

He had used the word "certainly" twice. It grated. And I knew intuitively that he was about to grate me with it again. He did. "A lot of credit," he said, "certainly goes to you."

I am informed by the woman's parents, who are understandably ungrateful to Mr. Z, that he writes and calls often. She does not open his letters. She will not come to the phone. And it is their satisfied opinion that, as Mr. Z had hoped, she is certainly happy.

Prognosis: Another breakdown by-and-by.

As for Mr. Z: He is certainly sick too, since he certainly isn't like any other man I ever knew. He will not leave Hometown, except for very short trips as far as Indianapolis and no farther. I suspect that he cannot leave Hometown. Why not?

To be utterly unscientific, and science becomes nauseating to a therapist after a case such as this: His Destination is there.

The good doctor's prognosis was correct. Sylvia became a popular and influential member of the international Jet Set, learned the many variations of the Twist. She became known as the Duchess of Rosewater. Many men proposed, but she was too happy to think of either marriage or divorce. And then she