"And yet you go?"
"No, Mr. Lisburn, the car goes."
"Don't you think you and the car are the same?"
She gave him a long wondering stare, and presently insisted that she
must go. She promised, however, that she would do everything in her
power to find out what was hidden in those sinister bushes. She was to
keep a pencil and paper beside her bed and write down everything she
could remember as soon as she waked up in the morning.
She hurried home to tell Aunt Georgy all that had occurred and was
disappointed to find her aunt established at the bridge table with
Norma and two of Norma's friends. It seemed that Mr. Lisburn had been
expected as a fourth and they had been obliged to come to Aunt Georgy
at the last minute to make up the table. Norma was still angry.
"They can't have it both ways--these psychoanalysts," Norma was saying.
"It's always a Freudian forgetting--a wish-thought--when you forget an
engagement with them, and something quite professional and unavoidable
when they break an engagement with you."
"What Norma means, Evie," said Aunt Georgy, without raising her eyes
from the interesting hand which had just been dealt her, "is that she
suspects Mr. Lisburn of having had something more amusing to do."
Evie shook her head as if you couldn't be sure with men like that.
"Perhaps he had," she said.
Then Aunt Georgy knew the interview had gone well.
Three days later, not having heard anything more from her, he came
to the house late in the afternoon. He was in his own car, and he
suggested that perhaps he could help her to overcome her repugnance to
motoring. At first she refused with every appearance of terror; but
soon she admitted that with him she would feel perfectly safe, and so
she yielded and got in.
She spoke little, and he could hear that she drew her breath in a
tremulous and disturbing manner. At last, in a lonely road, her terror
seemed to overmaster her, and she opened the door and would have sprung
out while the car was going thirty-five miles an hour if Lisburn had
not held her in.
As soon as he had brought the car to a standstill he took his arm
away, while little Evie cowered in the seat beside him.
"You see," she said at last, "how it is with me? If you had not been
there I should have jumped out and been killed. It's stronger than I
am."
"I see," he answered gently. "Well, if it happens again I won't force
you to stay in the car. You shall get out and walk home."
She thanked him warmly for his concession, but it did not happen again.
After this they had conferences every evening, as her stay at Jefferson
was coming to an end, and she still did not seem to be able to see what
was the emotional center of her dream.
The fact that Lisburn was trying to help little Evie soon began to be
known, and the knowledge affected different people differently. Norma
said that she should think Evie would be ashamed to take up so much of
Mr. Lisburn's time, considering how contemptuous she had been about
the whole science of psychoanalysis. The Reverend Mr. Gordon said
that he had never been in any doubt that the human spirit needed the
confessional, but that only a man in holy orders was fit to receive
confession. The mayor was a little more violent. He said that it
appeared to him that this fellow was practicing medicine without a
license, and that if the law could not reach him it ought to be able
to. He hoped it wasn't doing little Miss Evie any harm. Aunt Georgy
tried to reassure him, and said Evie seemed in the best of health and
spirits, at which the mayor, looking gloomier than ever, said he was
much relieved. Aunt Georgy had just been telling this to Evie as she
was about to start for her last conference. She was going away the next
day.
"Have you decided what it is that is hidden in the bushes?" her aunt
asked her.
Evie nodded.
"Yes," she said; "it's a black panther--a beautiful, lithe, vigorous,
graceful, dangerous wild animal."
"Mercy!" exclaimed Aunt Georgy. "He'll think it's himself."
"Do you think he's a vain man, Aunt Georgy?"
"Everyone's as vain as that."
"Well, that isn't my fault," said Evie, and went on her way.
Aunt Georgy shook her head. Life was often like that, she thought--a
woman despised a man for believing something that she had exercised all
her ingenuity to make him believe.
Lisburn was on his feet when Evie entered, and as soon as he had seen
her settled in the deep chair he began to pace up and down; like a
panther, she thought, but did not say so; that would have been crude.
"Well," he said, fixing his black eyes on her, "you've found out what
it is, haven't you?"
She nodded.
"You are clever," she answered. "I don't know what you'll make of
it--it sounds so silly." She looked up at him, rubbing the back of
one hand against the palm of the other. "It's--it's a panther; just a
beautiful black panther; a splendid, lithe, graceful, dangerous wild
animal." Even little Evie was susceptible at times to embarrassment,
and at this moment she could not endure the piercing stare of those
black eyes. She dropped her eyes modestly and murmured, "Oh, Mr.
Lisburn, do you think you can help me?"
"I'm sure I can," he answered; "at least, I can if I may be perfectly
candid."
Evie said that was all she asked--candor.
"In that case--" said he. He walked to the door and leaned against it
as if the revelations he was about to make were such that she might
try to escape before she heard him out. "In that case," he repeated,
in that smooth, almost honeyed tone in which the psychoanalyst clothes
even the most shocking statements, "let me say that you are the most
phenomenal little liar, little Evie, that I have ever met--yes, among
all the many I have known I gladly hand you the palm."
"Mr. Lisburn!" said Evie, but she was so much surprised and interested
that she did not do justice to her protest.
"What makes me angry," he went on in his civil tone, "is that you
should imagine you could get away with it. However much of an ass you
may consider me, you ought to have known that there was enough in the
science of psychoanalysis to show from the very beginning that you were
a fraud."
"Not from the beginning!" said Evie.
"From the first evening. You haven't one single symptom of a person
with a neurosis--not one. If you knew a little bit more--pooh, if you
knew anything at all about the subject--"
"I read your book," she answered, as if this put the blame on him.
"Not very intelligently, then, or you would have done a better fraud."
"You were willing to waste a lot of time on a fraud."
"It hasn't been wasted. And that brings me to my second point. I will
now tell you what perhaps you don't know, and that is why you did it."
"I know perfectly well, thank you," replied Evie. "I did it because you
were so poisonous about me that afternoon at Aunt Georgy's. I thought
I'd like to show you--"
"That is a rationalization," he interrupted, waving it away with one
hand. "You did it because you are strongly attracted to me."
"Attracted to you!" said Evie in a most offensive tone.
"I am the panther in the bushes."
Evie laughed contemptuously.
"I knew you'd think you were the panther," she said; "I simply knew it."
"Of course you did," he answered. "That's the very reason you dreamed
it."
"But I didn't dream it," she returned triumphantly. "I thought you had
grasped that. I didn't dream it. I never dream."
He was not triumphed over.
"Well," he said, "you made it up; that's the same thing--a daydream, a
romance."
"I made it up particularly in order to deceive you," Evie explained.
"That's what you think," he answered; "but it isn't true. You made it
up in order to let me know you were attracted to me, for I repeat that
you are attracted to me."
Little Evie sprang up from the deep chair in which she had sat at ease
during so many evening conferences.
"You may repeat it until you are black in the face," she said; "but I'm
not, I'm not, I'm not!"
"Don't you see that the emotion with which you repudiate the idea
proves that it's the truth?"
An inspiration came to her.
"Then why," she demanded--"the other afternoon when you explained
so much why you didn't like me--why doesn't that prove that you are
attracted to me?"
"Little Evie," he said, "it does. That's the truth. You are almost
everything of which I disapprove in woman. I love you."
He approached and took her in his arms.
"I hate you," said Evie, in a tone too conversational to be impressive.
He behaved as if she had not spoken. She drew away from him, though not
wholly out of the circle of his arms.
"I don't think you can have understood me," she remarked coldly. "I
said I hated you."
"I feel more sure of you than if you had said you loved me."
"Then I'll say I love you."
"Yes, dear, I know you do."
She sighed.
"You're not a very consistent man, are you?" she said.
She spoke in a tone of remote philosophy, but she leaned her forehead
against his chest.
When the story came out, as of course it was bound to do--for both Evie
and Lisburn seemed to think they had been rather clever about the whole
thing, and they told everybody--Fanny was deeply shocked. In fact, she
owned that if she had been Evie's mother she would never have held up
her head again.
"To think," she said, "of Evie, who has always seemed so dignified and
well-bred and not of this generation at all--to think that she invented
the whole thing in order to attract Mr. Lisburn's attention!"
"Fanny," said Aunt Georgy, "do you remember the first day you met your
present husband? You twisted your ankle just so that he might have to
carry you upstairs to your room. Well, my dear, you recovered entirely
as soon as he had gone, and walked all over everywhere. A strange young
man carried you in his arms, Fanny. If you ask me, I call the new
technique more delicate and modest than the old."