She did not rise, but pulled her feet under her for warmth and drew closer the scratchy antiseptic-smelling blanket. At this hour the cells were quiet. Another prisoner snored, probably the old woman who had been brought in drunk last night, her high defiant monotone of obscenities temporarily hushed.
A few months ago Callista would have reached for the notebook by her bed to write down what she could recapture of the dream. Edith had wondered if all that intensive reading in psychology wasn't too one-sided, introspective-making. "Maybe, Cal, you ought to be meeting people more and thinking less about their insides." But to meet one person is to meet a thousand selves; and it seemed to Callista that she had remained critical, as Edith probably feared she wouldn't. "Cal, I wish you had more counterbalance, too, for those psychologists in print. I've read them. They don't look out of the windows enough. Why not contrast them with the exact scientists?—who often have the same fault but in a different style?" Something in that.... "There isn't one of those boys, going back to Papa Freud himself, who wouldn't be improved by a refresher course in first-year biology."
And Edith had gone on to urge her, once more, to go to college next year—Callista, inwardly, very nearly ready to agree. She recalled the crystal April afternoon, and Edith standing, her back turned, looking out the studio's north window, the light a clear perfection on her red hair—why must Edith imagine herself homely? "Here—may I say it?—you're not quite far enough away from your Mom."
"A million light years."
"Of course, darling, but not in the flesh. And I keep thinking that right now maybe you ought to be farther from me." Edith shrugged and sighed. "For your sake, that is, certainly not for mine. Right now I could be a little too rich for your blood."
"No. If not for your sake, then not for mine."
Edith had come back to her then, standing with the great cool light at her back, looking down in one of her sudden moods of softness and gravity. "All right, Cal. But think about college for next fall?"
In agreement more than half sincere, Callista said: "I will—I'll think about it. You ought to marry, Edith."
"Narrow pelvis, distaste for an overpopulated world. I don't think it's my dish. I like men. The few that I've thought I'd like for keeps turned out to be guys who didn't want me, or at least not that way...."
But as for the reading in psychology, Edith's opinion remembered was still not quite acceptable. Freud and his successors still seemed to Callista like the best available guides into the nearest and most tormenting section of the jungle. One could rule out those who had fallen into worship of the sofa-pillow god Adjustment, and in doing so lost sight of the individual self or never noticed it. One could also remain critical of any guide, since the self must learn the sound of its own voice and discover its own country.