"Just why are you so interested in studying me, Professor Kennedy?" she asked, pointedly, yet without hostility in her tone.
It was a rather difficult question to answer, and I must admit that I could scarcely have met it adequately myself. However, it took more than that to give Kennedy a poser.
"Oh," he replied, quickly, with an engaging airiness, "as a psychologist I'm interested in all sorts of queer things—things that must often seem strange to other people. Perhaps it's highbrow stuff. But for a long time—and not in connection with you at all, Mrs. Wilford—I've been interested in dreams."
He paused a moment, moving a chair for her, and I could see that he was observing the effect of the statement on her. She did not seem to show any emotion at all over it, and Kennedy went on.
"Often I've studied my own dreams. I find that if, when I wake in the morning, I immediately try to recollect whether I have dreamed anything the night before or not, I invariably find that I have. But if I do something else—even as simple a thing as take a bath or shave—unless the dreams were especially vivid, they are all gone when I try to recollect them. I'm almost convinced that we dream continuously in sleep, that more often we don't recollect the dreams than we do. Your dreams interested me at the very start. I guess that was why Doctor Leslie repeated them to me. He knew that I was a crank, if you may call it that, on dreams. As for detective work of the old kind—that sort of thing Doyle does and—well—I leave that to Doyle." He shrugged.
As Kennedy rattled on, I could see or fancy that Honora was becoming more reassured.
"What is it you want me to do now?" she asked, her reluctance disappearing.
"Nothing very difficult—for you," he flattered. "You see, I have here a list of words, selected at random. I don't suppose it will mean anything. Yet there are lots of things these strange people, the modern experimental psychologists, do that seem perfectly foolish until you understand them. If we can once get at the bottom of your dreams, find out what causes them, I mean, I feel sure that we can make that nervousness of yours vanish as a prestidigitator will cause a card to vanish into thin air."
She nodded. At least on the surface, she seemed satisfied, though I could not be sure but that beneath the surface it was really that she was shrewdly convinced that it was necessary to make the best of a bad situation.
"You see," Craig pursued, seizing whatever advantage he might have, "as I read off from the list of words, I wish that you would repeat the first word, anything," he emphasized, "that comes into your mind, no matter how trivial it may seem to you. Perhaps it is not so trivial, after all, as you think. It may be just the thing that will lead to helping you."