"Are you sure that it was not Vina Lathrop?" he shot out quickly.
For just a fraction of a second she was startled, almost disconcerted. But instantly she regained her control.
"Yes," she answered, positively. "I am sure it was not. It was no one I know."
Yet I was somehow more than ever convinced that she meant Vina Lathrop, after all—Vina, who was of quite a different type from herself. What it all meant was another question. I knew that we should have taken a long step toward the discovery if we could only have got her to admit it. But she was keenly on guard now. There was not a chance of a direct admission strong enough, though the indirect admission was.
"No one?" pressed Kennedy. "Think!"
"No, no one! Oh, why must I be badgered and hounded this way?" she burst forth. "What have I done? Am I not grief-stricken enough as it is?—I hate—you—all!"
It was the first time that she had let this undercurrent of her feelings leap to the surface, beyond control. She seemed to realize it, and instantly to repress it, as she stood there, her great, lustrous eyes fixed upon us—with defiance mixed with fear and doubt.
It was startling, dramatic, cruel, perhaps merciless—this dissecting of the soul of the handsome woman before us. But it had come to a point where it was absolutely necessary to get at the truth. At least Kennedy seemed convinced that locked in her heart was the key to the mystery.
Honora, hitherto almost pallid, was now flushed and indignant. For the first time we saw a flash of real feeling and I knew that underneath her conventional exterior a woman existed—very real, capable of the heights of feeling and passion when once aroused. It made me more than ever sympathetic toward her. I longed to help her, yet there seemed no way to do so. Only Honora might work out Honora's salvation.
It was then and later that I realized that the very manner of her indignation showed the truth of the new psychology of dreams, for, as I later learned, people often become indignant when the analyst strikes what is called by the new psychologists the "main complex" of ideas.