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—