Aunt Georgy Hadley was rather unpopular with her own generation
because she did not think the younger one so terrible. "I can't see,"
she insisted, "that they are so different from what we were." For
an unmarried lady of forty to admit that she had ever had anything
in common with the young people of the present day shocked her
contemporaries.
Aunt Georgy was a pale, plain, brilliant-eyed woman, who liked to
talk, to listen to other people talk, and to read. She simply hated
to do anything else. As a girl she had always said that the dream of
her life was to be bedridden; and so when, after she had ceased to be
young, she had broken her hip so badly as to make walking difficult
many people regarded it as a judgment from heaven. Georgy herself said
it was a triumph of mind over matter; she was now freed from all active
obligations, while it became the duty of her friends and relations to
come and sit beside her sofa and tell her the news, of which, since she
lived in a small town, there was always a great deal.
Her two sisters, married and mothers both, differed with her most
violently about the younger generation. Her sister Fanny, who had
produced three robust, handsome members of the gang under discussion,
asked passionately, "Did we carry flasks to parties?"
"How silly it would have been if we had, when it was always there
waiting for us," answered Georgy.
Her sister Evelyn, who had produced one perfect flower--little
Evie--demanded, "Did we motor thirty miles at midnight to dance in
disreputable road houses?"
"No," said Georgina, "because in our day we did not have motors; but we
did pretty well with the environment at our disposal. I remember that
Evelyn was once becalmed on the Sound all night in a catboat with a
young man, and Fanny was caught just stepping off to a masked ball in
the Garden, only--"
"I was not," said Fanny, as one who slams the door in the face of an
unwelcome guest.
"Imagine Georgy's mind being just a sink for all those old scandals!"
said Evelyn pleasantly, but without taking up the question of the truth
or falsity of the facts stated.
Although Georgy was the youngest of the three Hadley sisters she, being
unmarried, had inherited the red-brick house in Maple Street. It had a
small grass plot in front--at least, it would have been a grass plot
if the roots of the two maple trees which stood in it had not long ago
come through the soil. There was, however, a nice old-fashioned garden
at the back of the house; and the sitting room looked out on this. Here
Aunt Georgy's sofa stood, beside the fire in winter and beside the
window in summer. The room was rather crowded with books and light blue
satin furniture, and steel engravings of Raphael Madonnas and the Death
of Saint Jerome; and over the mantelpiece hung a portrait by Sully of
Aunt Georgy's grandmother, looking, everyone said, exactly as little
Evie looked today.
It was to the circle round the blue satin sofa that people came,
bearing news--from nieces and nephews fresh from some new atrocity,
to the mayor of the town, worried over the gift of a too costly
museum. Jefferson was the sort of town that bred news. In the first
place, it was old--Washington had stopped there on his way to or from
Philadelphia once--so it had magnificent old-fashioned ideals and
traditions to be violated, as they constantly were. In the second
place, it was near New York; most of the population commuted daily,
thus keeping in close touch with all the more dangerous features of
metropolitan life. And last, everyone had known everyone else since the
cradle, and most of them were related to one another.
There was never any dearth of news, and everyone came to recount, not
to consult. Aunt Georgy did not like to be consulted. One presented
life to her as a narrative, not as a problem. There was no use in
asking her for advice, because she simply would not give it.
"No," she would say, holding up a thin, rather bony hand, "I can't
advise you. I lose all the wonderful surge and excitement of your story
if I know I shall have to do something useful about it at the end. It's
like reading a book for review--quite destroys my pleasure, my sense of
drama."
That was exactly what she conveyed to those who talked to her--a
sense of the drama, not of her life but of their own. The smallest
incident--the sort that most of one's friends don't even hear when it
is told to them--became so significant, so amusing when recounted to
Aunt Georgy that you went on and on--and told her things.
Even her sisters, shocked as they constantly were by something they
described as "Georgy's disloyalty to the way we were all brought up,"
told her everything. Step by step, the progress, or the decadence, by
which the customs of one generation change into the customs of the next
one was fought out by the three ladies, _née_ Hadley, at the side of
that blue satin sofa.
It began with cigarettes for girls and the new dances for both sexes.
At that remote epoch none of the nieces and nephews were old enough
either to smoke or dance; so, although the line of the battle had been
the same--Fanny and Evelyn anti and Georgy pro--the battle itself had
not been so bitter and personal as it afterward became.
The first time that Fanny's life was permanently blighted was when
Norma, her eldest child, was called out and publicly rebuked in dancing
school for shimmying. She wept--Fanny of course, not Norma, who didn't
mind at all--and said that she could never hold up her head again. But
she must have lifted it, for it was bowed every few months for many
years subsequently. Aunt Georgy at once sent for her niece and insisted
on having a private performance of the offensive dance, over which she
laughed heartily. It looked to her, she said, so much like the old
horse trying to shake off a horsefly.
The next time that the social fabric in Jefferson tottered and Fanny's
head was again bowed was at the discovery that the younger set was not
wearing corsets. Fanny tiptoed over and shut the sitting-room door
before she breathed this bad news into her sister's ear.
"None of them," she said.
"But you wouldn't want the boys to, would you?" answered Georgy.
Fanny explained that she meant the girls didn't.
"Mercy!" exclaimed her sister. "We were all scolded because we did.
Elderly gentlemen used to write embarrassing articles about how we were
sacrificing the health of the next generation to our vanity, and how
the Venus de Milo was the ideal feminine figure; and now these girls
are just as much scolded--"
"The worst of it is," said Fanny, rolling her eyes and not listening,
"that they take them off and leave them in the dressing room. They say
that at the Brownes' the other evening there was a pile that high."
Still, in spite of her disapproval, Fanny's head was not so permanently
bowed this time, because every mother in Jefferson was in the same
situation. But craps struck Fanny a shrewder blow, because her child,
Norma, was a conspicuous offender here, whereas little Evie, her
sister's child, didn't care for craps. She said it wasn't amusing.
In order to decide the point Aunt Georgy asked Norma to teach her the
game, and they were thus engaged when Mr. Gordon, the hollow-cheeked
young clergyman, came to pay his first parochial visit. He said he
wasn't at all shocked, and turned to Evie, who was sitting demurely
behind the tea table eager to give him a cup of Aunt Georgy's excellent
tea.
There was something a little mid-Victorian about Evie, and the only
blot on Aunt Georgy's perfect liberalism was that in her heart she
preferred her to the more modern nieces. Evie parted her thick
light-brown hair in the middle and had a little pointed chin, like a
picture in an old annual or a flattered likeness of Queen Victoria as a
girl. She was small and decidedly pretty, though not a beauty like her
large, rollicking, black-haired cousin Norma.
Norma's love affairs--if they were love affairs, and whether they were
or not was a topic often discussed about the blue satin sofa--were
carried on with the utmost candor. Suddenly one day it would become
evident that Norma was dancing, golfing, motoring with a new young man.
Everybody would report to Aunt Gregory the number of hours a day that
he and Norma spent together, and Aunt Gregory would say to Norma, "Are
you in love with him, Norma?" and Norma would answer "Yes" or "No" or
"I'm trying to find out."
"There's no mystery about this generation," Fanny would say.
"Why should there be?" Norma would say, and would stamp out again, and
would be heard hailing the young man of the minute, "We're considered
minus on romance, Bill"; and ten of them would get into a car intended
for four and drive away, looking like a basketful of puppies.
But about little Evie's love affairs there was some mystery. Aunt
Georgy did not know that Evie had ever spoken to the mayor--a
middle-aged banker of great wealth--and yet one day when he came to
tell Miss Hadley about the museum he told her instead about how Evie
had refused to marry him, and how unhappy he was. The nice young
clergyman, too, who preached so interestingly and pleased the parish in
every detail, was thinking of getting himself transferred to a city in
California because the sight of an attentive but unattainable Evie in
the front pew every Sunday almost broke his heart.
Aunt Georgy exonerated Evie from blame as far as the mayor was
concerned, but she wasn't so sure about the Reverend Mr. Gordon.
"Evie," she said, "did you try to enmesh that nice-looking man of God?"
Evie shook her head.
"I don't get anywhere if I try, Aunt Georgy," she answered. "It has to
come of itself or not at all. If Norma sees a man she fancies she swims
out after him like a Newfoundland dog. But I have to sit on the shore
until the tide washes something up at my feet. I don't always like what
it washes up either."
The simile amused Aunt Georgy, but the more she reflected the more she
doubted its accuracy. Those tides that washed things up--Evie had some
mysterious control of them, whether she knew it or not. Evie's method
and Norma's differed enormously in technic, but wasn't the elemental
aggression about the same?
Life in Jefferson was never more interesting to Aunt Georgy than when
psychoanalysis swept over them. Of course, they had all known about
it, and read Freud, or articles about Freud; but the whole subject was
revived and made personal by the arrival of Lisburn. Lisburn was not
a doctor of medicine but of philosophy. He was an assistant professor
of psychology in a New York college. He had written his dissertation
on The Unconscious as Portrayed in Poetic Images. With an astonishing
erudition he brought all poetry from Homer to Edna St. Vincent Millay
into line with the new psychology. Besides this, he was an exceedingly
handsome young man--tall, dark, decided, and a trifle offhand and
contemptuous in his manner. What girl could ask more? Norma did not
ask a bit more. The moment she saw him she--in Evie's language--swam
out after him. She met him at dinner one evening, and the next day
her conversation was all about dreams and fixations and inhibitions.
Mothers began to assemble rapidly about the blue satin sofa. Craps had
been vulgar, the shimmy immoral, but this was the worst of all.
"Georgy," said Fanny solemnly, "they go and sit on that young man's
piazza, and they talk about things--things which you and I did not know
existed, and if we did know they existed we did not know words for
them; and if we did know words for them we did not take the slightest
interest in them."
"Then there can't be any harm in them," said Georgy, "because I'm sure
when we were girls we took an interest in everything there was any harm
in. But it sounds to me just like a new way of holding hands--like
palmistry in our day. You remember when you took up palmistry, Evelyn.
It made me so jealous to see you holding my young men's hands!"
"It's not at all the same thing," answered Evelyn. "There was nothing
in palmistry that wasn't perfectly nice."
"Oh, yes, there was," said Georgy. "There was that line, you know,
round the base of the two middle fingers. We all felt a little shocked
if we had it and a little disappointed if we hadn't."
But her sisters were too much worried to be amused. Their children,
they said, were talking about things that could not be named. Fanny did
name them, however, and was grimly glad to see that even Georgy, the
liberal, reeled under the blow.
She recovered enough to say, "Well, after all, is it so different? We
called people Puritans instead of saying that they had inhibitions.
We didn't say a boy had a fixation on the mother, but we called him
mother's little carpet knight. And as for dreams, Fanny, when a
young man told me he had a dream about me I did not need a doctor of
philosophy to tell me what that meant."
Even Fanny was obliged to confess that her younger son Robert had been
cured of his incipient stammer after a few interviews with Lisburn. And
the young Carters, who, after three months of marriage, were confiding
to everyone their longing for divorce, had been reconciled. There was a
dream in this--about a large white gardenia--and there was an incident
connected with it--a girl in a florist's shop--
About this time the mayor, still worrying over the upkeep of the
museum, wanted some sort of entertainment given in order to raise
money. It was suggested that a lecture on psychoanalysis by Lisburn
would be popular. Norma was delegated to go and ask him--make him, was
the way the committee put it. Needless to say, she returned triumphant.
Aunt Georgy was among the first to arrive at the town hall on the
evening the lecture took place. She had become curious about the young
man and wanted a front seat. She limped up the aisle, leaning on her
grandfather's heavy ivory-headed cane, with little Evie beside her.
Norma was busy taking--one might almost say snatching--tickets at the
door. It is a peculiar feature of modern life that so much time is
spent first in getting lecturers to consent to lecture and then in
drumming up an audience to hear them. But this time the audience was
not difficult to get. They came in crowds.
The mayor opened the meeting. He was not a ready speaker, and the
sight of Evie, sitting so attentive in the front row, embarrassed him
hideously. He said a few panting words about the needs of the museum
and turned the meeting over to the Reverend Mr. Gordon, who was going
to introduce the speaker--who was going, in fact, to do a little bit
more than that.
He advanced to the edge of the platform, looked down at Evie and
smiled--after all, he wasn't in the pulpit--folded his hands as if lawn
frills ought to have been dripping from them, and began:
"It is my great pleasure and privilege to introduce the speaker of the
evening, although I myself am not at all in sympathy with the subject
about which--which--about which he--"
Aunt Georgy had a second of agony. Could he avoid using the verb "to
speak"? It seemed impossible; but she underrated his mental agility.
"--about which he is to make his interesting and instructive address."
Mr. Gordon pulled down his waistcoat with a slight gesture of triumph.
"The church," he continued, "has never been in very cordial sympathy
with what I may be permitted, perhaps, to call these lay miracle
workers."
Here he threw a smile over his shoulder to Lisburn--a smile intended
to be friendly and reassuring; but as it had in it something acid and
scornful, it only served to make his words more hostile. "The church
endures," he went on, "and watches in each generation the rise and fall
of a new science, a new philosophy, a new panacea, a new popular fad
like this one."
Having done what he could to discredit the lecture, he gave the
lecturer himself a flattering sentence: "A professor in one of our
great universities, a new resident in this community, and my very good
friend, Mr. Kenneth Lisburn."
The Reverend Mr. Gordon had been standing between Aunt Georgy and the
speaker, so that she did not really get a good look at him until he
stood up.
Then she said "Mercy!" in a hissing whisper in Evie's ear.
"Mercy what?" asked little Evie, rather coldly.
"So good-looking!" murmured Aunt Georgy.
Evie moved her shoulders about.
"Roughhewn," she whispered back.
Perhaps his features were a trifle rugged; but Aunt Georgy admired his
hair--black as a crow under the bright though sometimes intermittent
light of the Jefferson Light and Power Company. His eyes--black
also--gleamed from deep sockets--"Like a rat's in a cave," Evie said.
Lecturing was evidently nothing of an adventure to him. It did not
embarrass him as it had embarrassed the mayor; it did not stimulate
him to an eloquence too suave and fluent as it did Mr. Gordon. It
created not the least change in his personality. He stood on the
platform as he swung in his chair in his college room, ready to say
what he had to say as simply and as clearly as he could.
He wasn't so sure, he began, that his subject was popular. He found
most people enjoyed the exploration of other people's unconscious, not
of their own. In fact you could generally tell whether you were right
in a diagnosis or not by the passion with which the victim contradicted
you and the rapidity with which he invented explanations other than
the true one. He was not, however, going to talk about psychoanalysis
in general--rather too large a subject--with its relations to art and
medicine. He was going to talk about the simple, commonplace actions of
everyday life as clews to the unconscious--first, the so-called trivial
ones. Nothing is really trivial. The tunes we whistle, the songs we
sing, nine times out of ten have a wish-thought behind them. An amusing
case of this had come to him the other day. A man had consulted him
because he was being driven mad by a tune that ran in his head night
and day. It was the Funeral March of a Marionette. Well, when it turned
out that he was unhappily married and that his wife's name was Dolly
it wasn't very hard to see whose funeral it was that he was mentally
staging.
Aunt Georgy was perfectly delighted. She saw that psychoanalysis was
going to make life in Jefferson infinitely more entertaining. The
sphere of gossip was so remarkably extended. In old times one could
only talk about what had been done, said or written; but now what was
dreamed, what was desired, and, best of all, what was entirely omitted
could be made as interesting as a crime. She wriggled down into her
chair with pleasure as he went on to take up the question of the types
that people fell in love with. Of course, we have all noticed how
people tend to fall in love again and again with the same type. The
spoiled weak son is forever looking for a mother type to take care of
him; the girl brought up under the domination of the father idea is
attracted by nothing but protective older types of men.
Lisburn went on to describe such cases in greater detail so accurately
that all through the audience married couples were nodding to one
another and themselves. He described also a variant of this: How some
people always abused the type that attracted them most; the virile man
who is forever making fun of feminine weaknesses, the womanly woman
always taking on about man's wickedness; they're afraid of the black
magic they attack; they are trying to exorcise the spell--
As soon as the lecture was over, and while eager members of the
audience were crowding to the platform to discuss with the speaker the
cases of mysterious friends who had dreamed this and forgotten that,
Aunt Georgy beckoned to Norma.
"Do," she said, "go and disentangle that interesting young man from his
votaries, or whatever they are, and bring him down to be introduced to
me."
"It was interesting, wasn't it?" said Norma, with an effort at
detachment.
"I can never be sufficiently grateful," answered Aunt Georgy. "It is so
satisfactory the way he lays the strictly virtuous open to attack--the
sort of people we've wanted to catch in a scandal and never been able
to."
Norma nodded.
"Oh, yes," she said, "Ken thinks people like that have a very foul
unconscious."
Aunt Georgy gave a slight snort and asked Norma if she remembered the
Bab Ballad about:
_For only scoundrels dare to do_
_What we consider just and true;_
_And only good men do in fact,_
_What we should think a dirty act._
But Norma did not enjoy a humorous approach to a subject which she had
only recently made her own. She withdrew; frowning slightly, and saying
that she would try to get a word with him.
"Oh, don't let's wait," said Evie after a few minutes, during which the
crowd on the platform increased.
And so Aunt Georgy was led home by the mayor and her small niece
without getting a word with the speaker. But she was a determined
woman; and though Lisburn was a busy man, between lecturing at his
college in the daytime and conferences with mentally maladjusted in
Jefferson in the evening and giving a good many spare hours to Norma,
a free afternoon was finally found and Norma brought him to tea.
Little Evie, who happened to be spending a week or two with her aunt,
immediately announced her intention of being out.
"I don't like that man," she said.
Aunt Georgy, always eager for information, inquired why she didn't.
Evie thought a long time, and then said, "Because he invades one's
private life."
"Does Norma feel that way?"
Little Evie laughed. "Norma hasn't got a private life," she answered.
At five o'clock, when Aunt Georgy was settled on her blue sofa, with
her cane beside her and her tea set in front, Evie stole quietly out
of the back door into the garden as Norma and the seer entered at the
front.
"Well, here he is, Aunt Georgy," Norma shouted from the threshold, as
if she had done a good deal for an elderly relation.
He came in and shook hands, unruffled by Norma's introduction.
"Where's Evie?" Norma went on in a tone rather like a sheriff's officer.
"She was so sorry--she had an engagement," said Aunt Georgy, quite as
if it were true.
Norma gave a short shout.
"Oh, Ken knows she doesn't like him," she said; "and as a matter of
fact, he isn't very keen about her."
Lisburn looked at Miss Hadley, not exactly embarrassed, but as if to
say that when you told a thing to Norma you told it to the whole world.
Aunt Georgy was interested in his not denying the accusation. She had
never before happened to meet a man who actually did not like Evie.
"You don't admire my little niece?" she said, in her tone of seeking
information merely.
"No," shouted Norma from the hearthrug. "He thinks she's too colorless,
too much tied up with inhibitions to be interesting."
"Of course, I see your niece's great charm," he answered; "but, as
I said the other night, we all have our own type--the type that
particularly appeals--and I am attracted to a more active, aggressive
type."
"That's why he likes me," said Norma, with her mouth not empty of
chocolate cake--"because I lead a great, free, ramping life. Isn't that
true, Ken?"
"I'm sure it's true you lead a great, free, ramping life, Norma," said
her aunt.
"Yes, and that's why I'm so healthy," answered Norma, and she danced a
little on her flat-heeled shoes. They were large shoes, but then, she
was a large woman.
Aunt Georgy was surprised to find herself a partisan. It annoyed her to
hear her favorite niece dismissed as attractive to other men but not to
this reader of human hearts.
She said almost pettishly, "Evie is healthy, too--one of the healthiest
people I ever knew."
"I bet she has dreams," said Norma.
"I doubt it."
"Everybody dreams, Aunt Georgy," said Norma, really astonished at her
aunt's ignorance of the facts of life. "If you don't remember your
dreams, that only shows that they are so awful that you don't allow
them to come up into your conscious at all."
Aunt Georgy was opening her mouth to contradict, but found that Lisburn
was speaking.
"That's the theory, Miss Hadley," he said, less positively than Norma;
"that everyone dreams, and that our dreams represent our unfulfilled
and unacknowledged desires. A type like--like Miss--"
"Like Evie," said Norma, a foe to last names.
"That type," Lisburn went on--"so restrained, so inhibited, so what
is called well-bred, is particularly likely to have dreams and almost
certain to be unwilling to admit having them."
He stopped as a slight sound at the door that led to the garden made
them all turn. Little Evie was standing there--had evidently been
standing there for some time. She had on a sky-blue dress, a large
childish hat and her arms were full of cherry blossoms. She looked more
than usually like a fashion plate of the '40's.
Norma immediately shouted at her, "You do dream, don't you, Evie? Be
honest for once in your life."
Aunt Georgy, who was herself an honest person, was aware of an utterly
unsuppressed wish that, whatever the facts were, Evie would say that
she had never had a dream in her life. Instead the girl, with her blue
eyes fixed on Lisburn, was nodding slowly.
"I've begun to dream lately," she said in a low tone.
Norma was delighted.
"I knew it," she said. "I'd have bet on it. It's extraordinary how one
gets to know these things. Tell us what your dream is about, Evie."
"Mercy!" exclaimed Aunt Georgy. "Isn't a person allowed more than one
dream nowadays?"
Evie sank down on the sofa at her aunt's feet.
"Mine's always the same," she murmured.
"Ah," said Lisburn, "a recurrent dream." He looked at her with
interest. "Does it trouble you?"
Evie made a cooing sound like a dove, in doubt. Norma began to tease
her to tell. Aunt Georgy thought she was tiresome, nagging and
bothering like that. She told her to let Evie alone. Norma shrugged her
shoulders.
"It's so characteristic of that introverted type," she said, "not to be
willing to be frank enough to be cured."
"Can one be cured?" asked Evie, and she raised her eyes to Lisburn.
He was a busy man, and he had stood up to go.
"I might--if it troubles you--be able to help you."
"Even," said Evie, "though you are not interested in my type?"
"Oh," cried Norma, "isn't that like you, Evie! You overheard the whole
thing, and instead of having it out then and there, as I should have,
you wait and give him a poisoned dig in the ribs when he's trying to be
nice to you."
Evie repeated in exactly the same tone: "Even though you are not
interested in my type?"
"I'm always interested in a case," he answered.
They exchanged unfriendly looks. Then he came to the sofa to say
good-by to Aunt Georgy. She was rummaging for a pencil among the litter
of papers and books beside her. She wanted to write down the name of
his book, but he insisted very civilly on sending it to her.
When he and Norma had gone Aunt Georgy turned to Evie.
"I'm glad," she said, "that you did not tell them what your dream was
about. They would have been sure to make something horrid out of it."
"I couldn't tell them."
"You mean it is horrid?"
"I hadn't made it up yet," answered Evie. "Dear Aunt Georgy, I never,
never dream. I'm always asleep before I get the covers well tucked in
at the nape of my neck, and I never wake up until someone comes in
and opens the shutters. Norma was so determined that I should have a
dream--perhaps she won't be so pleased. Mine is going to be a hard one
to interpret. Interested in cases, is he? Well, mine is going to be an
interesting one. Wait till we get his book."
The book was left at the door after dinner, and Aunt Georgy plunged at
once into it. She habitually read as a famished animal eats, tearing
the heart out of a book, utterly oblivious of the world until she had
finished. At last she looked up.
"Really, Evie," she exclaimed, "I'm afraid you can't get a dream out of
this. I'm not old-fashioned, but I must say--" She did not say what it
was she must say.
Evie took the book calmly.
"Of course, I shall be perfectly innocent as to what my dream means,
Aunt Georgy," she said. "Let's see. X, a young employe in a shoe
factory, dreamed-- My goodness, what an unpleasant man X must have
been! Now this isn't bad-- Or, no, that would involve mother. I
don't want to drag poor mother into it. Something wonderful might be
done with a tune--Old Black Joe, if only his name were Joe, which it
isn't.... And I shall begin to do a strange and apparently meaningless
thing--to have a compulsion. I mean--like buttering my bread on both
sides--"
"Don't you think it's a little dangerous?" said Aunt Georgy. "They
interpret everything so oddly."
"Yes, it's dangerous; but everything is. If you do nothing, that's the
worst of all." And Evie sank into the book.
A few days later, when Lisburn reached home in the late afternoon, he
found a note waiting for him at his house. It was written in Evie's
neat, fine hand, and said:
_Dear Mr. Lisburn_: Do you remember offering to help me in case
the dream--of which I think I spoke to you--began to give me
trouble? I must say I hesitate to take up your time, as the whole
thing seems so trivial [Lisburn gave a little shake of his head,
an indication that such experiences were far from trivial] but it
would be a relief to me to talk it over with you, and I shall stop
at your house for a few minutes this evening on the chance that
you may have a spare minute.
He laid the letter on the table and eyed it sideways as he lit his
pipe. Then he went to the telephone and called up Norma. He said he was
sorry, but that he wouldn't be able to come that evening for bridge.
Norma, as she herself had observed, did not suffer from inhibitions.
Her emotions found easy expression, and her emotion on this occasion
was disappointment mingled with anger. She expressed it freely over
the telephone. Lisburn hung up the receiver sharply. Self-expression
was all very well, he thought; but there was such a thing as having no
self-control. It was necessary for him to have a calm and receptive
mind in order to be of any assistance to this child who was coming
to consult him. He must make a mental picture of her personality and
recall her gestures, her vocabulary.
Soon after eight he heard her step on the piazza and went to the door
himself. She entered with that timid, conscious, apologetic manner
which had become so familiar to him in his patients. It seemed as if
she would have liked to make fun of herself for coming if only she had
been less frightened at finding herself there. The hand she gave him
shook. He drew forward a deep comfortable chair for her.
"Now tell me everything you can think of," he said; "your own way; I
won't interrupt."
She drew an uncertain breath.
"Well, I didn't think anything about it--you know how casually I spoke
the other day--but now I find it is beginning to affect my conduct.
I find I cannot bring myself to get into an automobile. I have never
driven a car myself, but I have always enjoyed driving with other
people; but now-- This dream of mine is about a car."
She described the dream at great length, though it was strangely
lacking in incident. It was merely that she was driving a small car of
her own--a very pretty white car with a good deal of blue about it. She
was driving along a wide street, and suddenly the car began to skid,
slowly at first and then faster and faster; and though her agony became
extreme and she turned the steering wheel more and more, she could do
nothing--the car made straight for the bushes, where some terrific but
unseen and unknown object was lurking.
He made her go over the details of it two or three times. The shade
of blue was about the same shade as the dress she was wearing, but he
elicited very little more. She could not, she said, get any clew as to
what was hidden in the bushes, except that it was something she was
horribly afraid of.
"And yet," he said, "you go toward it?"
"Yes; but entirely against my will, Mr. Lisburn."
"You're sure you go against your will?"