“N—no,” he replied. “My practice ordinarily does not lie in that direction. I used it not long ago, once, though. I have a patient under my care, a well-known club-man. He came to me originally—”
“Arnold Masterson?” asked Craig.
“Yes—how did you know his name?”
“Guessed it,” replied Craig laconically, as if he knew much more than he cared to tell. “He was a friend of Mrs. Maitland’s, was he not?”
“I should say not,” replied Dr. Ross, without hesitation. He was quite ready to talk without being urged. “Ordinarily,” he explained confidentially, “professional ethics seals my lips, but in this instance, since you seem to know so much, I may as well tell more.”
I hardly knew whether to take him at his face value or not. Still he went on: “Mrs. Maitland is, as I have hinted at, what we specialists would call a consciously frigid but unconsciously passionate woman. As an intellectual woman she suppresses nature. But nature does and will assert herself, we believe. Often you will find an intellectual woman attracted unreasonably to a purely physical man—I mean, speaking generally, not in particular cases. You have read Ellen Key, I presume? Well, she expresses it well in some of the things she has written about affinities. Now, don’t misunderstand me,” he cautioned. “I am speaking generally, not of this individual case.”
I was following Dr. Ross closely. When he talked so, he was a most fascinating man.
“Mrs. Maitland,” he resumed, “has been much troubled by her dreams, as you have heard, doubtless. The other day she told me of another dream. In it she seemed to be attacked by a bull, which suddenly changed into a serpent. I may say that I had asked her to make a record of her dreams, as well as other data, which I thought might be of use in the study and treatment of her nervous troubles. I readily surmised that not the dream, but something else, perhaps some recollection which it recalled, worried her. By careful questioning I discovered that it was—a broken engagement.”
“Yes,” prompted Kennedy.
“The bull-serpent, she admitted, had a half-human face—the face of Arnold Masterson!”