“It is very fine—only it cannot happen.”
“Why not?”
“The coachman would never swallow such a fool trick as that.”
“If you knew the history of our old New York families you would recall the episode of Mrs. Robert Nye, whose old coachman, English and stiff-necked, one day drove the empty victoria round Central Park, thinking he carried his mistress, because the lap-robe had been placed in the carriage by the footman before the old lady had gotten in—and usually the old lady got in first and the lap-robe followed.”
“But he said he saw Garrettson get in,” objected Kidder; “and the cigar-ashes were there on the floor!”
“The ashes were thrown in by the footman for the very purpose of making Argus-eyed reporters make a point of it. That and the crumpled newspapers clinched it, so that the coachman thought he remembered seeing Garrettson get in. It is what psychologists call an illusion of memory.”
“Oh, well—”
“Oh, well, it merely means that progressive people keep posted. Here, let me read you what Henry Rutgers Marshall, an American psychologist, better known to the learned bodies of Europe than to benighted compatriots like you, has to say about this. I copied it:
“Few of our memories are in any measure fully accurate as records; and under certain conditions, which arise more frequently than most of us realize, the characteristics of the memory-experience may appear in connection with images, or series of images, which are not revivals of any actual past events. In such cases the man who has such a memory-experience, automatically following his usual mode of thought, accepts it as the revival record of an actual occurrence in his past life. When we are convinced that this is not the case we say that he has suffered from an 'illusion of memory.'”
“The term 'illusion of memory' thus appears to be something of a misnomer. What we are really dealing with is a real memory-experience, but one by which we are led to make a false judgment—and this because the judgment, which in this special case is false, is almost invariably fully justified.