Since our previous discussion on the subject, I had turned it over many times in my mind. It was surely a new situation to me which this application of the new psychology was unfolding. Yet, under the exposition of Kennedy, I was not so bitterly hostile to it now as I had been before. Plainly enough, nothing that I had been able to offer to myself had fitted in with what I saw in the character of Honora Wilford. At least this seemed to fit.
"You would be surprised to learn how frequently such situations arise," defended Craig. "I suppose, to an analyst, they seem to be common, because it is only such cases that come to his attention. If one treated only red-haired men, one would, no doubt, soon get the idea that the community was composed mainly of the red-haired. That is just as foolish as to go to the other extreme and to deny that there are any red-haired people, just because one has never happened to see one."
The remark was obviously intended for me. I said nothing, but I was really alarmed. For I could see that the case was actually growing very much blacker for Honora as he proceeded. Was not Kennedy practically taxing her with loving another man than her husband? Was he not building up motives?
"The dreamer," he proceeded, "is always the principal actor in a dream, or the dream centers about the dreamer intimately. Dreams are personal. We never dream about matters that concern others primarily, but of matters that concern ourselves, either very directly or at least indirectly. So it has been with these dreams of Honora. They concern her intimately.
"Years ago that woman suffered what the new psychologists call a psychic trauma—a soul wound. She was engaged to Shattuck. We know that. But her censored consciousness rejected the manner of life of her fiancé. In pique, perhaps, she married Wilford. It was a wound when she cast aside her first love, a deep wound.
"But Nature always does her best to repair a wound—either a physical wound or a psychic wound. That underlies the psychology of forgetting. Honora thought she had found love again, in the advances of Wilford. But she had not, truly. She never lost her real, now subconscious, love for another—Shattuck. Day by day she tells herself that he is nothing to her, never really was, never again can be. She believes it. She lives it. Yet, when that censorship is raised in sleep, it is different. Then he pursues her, in her dreams. In actuality, too, I don't doubt that he pursues her, and she knows it. I'll wager Shattuck does not dream of her except frankly. He frankly thinks of her. He is still in love with her. It is a tough problem for Honora Wilford."
"I begin to see it more and more clearly," I admitted. "Dreams are very wonderful experiences, when one understands them rightly."
"Her dreams, especially," agreed Craig, fingering the papers. "Now there's that dream of Lathrop. I suspect she thinks of him somewhat as of a social lion. And I suppose he is—popular, a club-man, a lady-killer. Perhaps that is why she dreamed of him as a lion. But it wouldn't explain all. I recall he wore a beard. That may have suggested the tawny mane of a lion, too. The two ideas combined. There is the narrow path, too. A lion stands in the path. I don't quite fathom it yet. But, you see, Walter, of such stuff are dream lions made. This fantasy I must leave open for interpretation until we understand Lathrop himself better."
"About Shattuck," I reverted, not quite prepared to pass that point without clearing it as much as possible in my own mind. "Plainly he cares a great deal for her. I remember seeing one of Freud's books in his library. Suppose he knew her dreams. Would he not be able to discover that secretly she cared really very deeply for him and not for Vail?"
"He might," admitted Kennedy.