"Like as not she will be some fluffy little creature from the Midnight Frolic," I added, sarcastically. "It would be poetic justice if she were. And what a life she would lead you—with your confounded microscope and your test-tubes!"
Kennedy smiled indulgently. "If it should be the case," he replied, coolly, "it would only prove my theory. It's very simple. Two atoms are attracted like the electrically charged pith-balls—or repulsed. In love very often like repels like and attracts unlike—the old law, you know, as you saw it in the physics laboratory. We see it in this case, with these very people. All your fine-spun theories and traditions of society and law do not count for the weight of a spider thread against nature. That is precisely what I mean by my theory. We are concerned with deep fundamental human forces."
"You talk as though you had been reading some of the continental writers," I remarked.
"Perhaps. It makes no difference. Often much of our own Puritanism in literature covers a multitude of facts, as Puritanism does in life. Here's a case in point. Facts may be ugly things, we may not like them. Just the same they have to be faced. It won't do just cavalierly to reject things as Doctor Lathrop does with the Freud theory, which he does not like, for instance. And who is he that he should set himself up to determine fact and fake? Maybe, if we studied him we'd find he was no different from anybody else. I'll warrant it."
"I don't care about him," I hastened. "But it does rather jar on me to have you speak so positively on affairs of the heart," I protested.
"You think I can't observe them without experiencing them? I don't have to commit a murder in order to study and understand the murderer, you know. The fact is I am perhaps a better judge of some subjects for the mere fact that I can observe them from the outside, as it were. I am not grinding my own ax."
I shook my head at Kennedy's, to me, novel theories of love. In fact, the whole thing, from his dream interpretation down through each step he took in the case, seemed almost revolutionary. Convinced against my will, I was of half, at least, my own opinion still. Yet I did not feel in any position to combat him. The case would ultimately speak for itself, anyhow, I reflected.
"Now," he concluded, before I could think of a retort, "to get back to the case. Here are two women who no more understand the impulses that sway them than do the moon and sun in their courses. As I said, fundamental forces of sex are at play here. Perhaps even if you were able to get the truth from the various actors in this little drama they themselves could not tell you. Therefore, it is for me to unravel what is a closed book, even to them.
"And, strange as you may think it, Walter," he concluded, "the Freud theory will do it. Already I know more than even you suspect. There remains, however, the working out of the drama to its climax before I can be sure I have the truth, beyond mistake."