A graduate of Wellesley now in her thirty-eighth year, MRS. X is the wife of a successful lowyer who occupied an important post in the Pentagon during the war years. Their second daughter, Constance, was born in Washington, and then began the sensitive, stubborn struggle to reach the child through the barrier of her deficiency. The following article raises the question, Can a child who from birth is cut off from normal development be fitted into the close community of a family? A third child, Charlotte, was born eighteen months ago and is, as Mrs. X writes, “the happiest of substitutes for the sister who had to leave.”This is the second winner of an Atlantic I Personally Award.
"I find it rather difficult to make it clear to my children why we are not eligible, for from one point of view it isn't quite clear to me."