At Harvard parties, many guests end up discussing controversial issues and court cases involving medical ethics with Sissela. She presents the whole situation but never ventures an opinion on which way the decision should go. A trustee of the hospital Sissela works at explained, "She was very interesting to talk to on the Quinlan case." But even there she did not advocate a particular solution.

In spite of the complicated social problems she encounters in her work, she persists in offering idealistic solutions. She maintains that knowledge about abortions is becoming more widespread so that problems of late abortions will diminish. And she advocates decreasing machine and drug care for terminal patients and increasing human care, despite her knowledge that medical personnel and families of dying patients feel extremely uncomfortable with them and avoid them when the patient is close to death.

Yet her academic pursuits are the main topic of her conversations with a variety of regular guests at Harvard functions. They find her "extremely engaging" and likable, as one of them says. She is good at putting people at ease, but one observer sees "a veneer--she tries to appear calm but there is no inner peace."

"Her manner is more formal than is usual," for people in Harvard circles, the wife of a Harvard administrator says. "Perhaps it is because of her European upbringing." Sissela, too, believes her foreign background explains part of why she does not act like everyone else.

Her foreign feelings are most strongly apparent in her failure to adopt the American woman's increasing awareness of sexism, Sissela does not consider Harvard a male dominated environment; nor does she feel that being a women here has led to any special problems. "That may be something that I never really worried too much about. But that may also be because I did grow up in another country and it never occurred to me to worry about whether I was a woman or a man. That was really not something and it never occurred to me to worry about whether other people worried about that."

Sissela questions herself at times when many women would quickly seize the chance to charge sexism. In a situation where she feels her opinion is not being taken seriously, she explains with a small laugh, "The fact that I am a woman would not occur to me as the first possibility. I'd be much more worried had I done my homework, had I really prepared for this, am I being silly? But am I a woman? That would not come in as a very early question."

But Sissela does not feel at home in Europe, either. She left Sweden when she was twelve, and when she returns now it is not to her homeland. She loves to go back there and makes the trip about every three years. It's nostalgic then, journeying back to the land of her tomboy youth, where they didn't let the girls play soccer, as her daughters do here; where she avoided dance classes and thrilled in climbing trees. "I love to hear the people speaking my language. It's nice to go into a bookstore and see that all the books are in Swedish."

She has no ties to any country, she's never lived in one for long enough. She holds tightly to her children, stopping her writing when they come home to be with them. She is a very attentive mother despite her own independent childhood, filled with memories of famous important parents always leaving or on their way back. "When my parents were in India, they used to send us tapes, and they were so much nicer than letters."

And when the children leave for school she starts up the winding wooden stairway toward her garret and no one follows.