Well, this particular rumpus had been settled, and the attack of officious Pharisaism upon Janet's reputation had received a black eye. Janet wondered whether the blow was to be recorded as a knockout or merely as the end of the first round.
Time would show. Meanwhile, she dressed and breakfasted; then, with all the gravity of her twenty-seven years, she began to discharge the responsible duties of manager of the House.
But the memory of the nightmare would not down. Not even the excitement she still felt in making the rounds of her three departments sufficed to dispel it. In the children's section, she applauded the new floor games which the kindergartner had invented for her wards; she became a ready listener to the woes of the matron in charge of the household division; on her way through the cuisine, she devoted her faculties to the task of adjudicating the claims of the cook against the dietitian in command. And she sought distraction in the stupendous thought that these three great departments of the Susan B. Anthony House were coordinated in the person of Miss J. Barr, the business manager and personal representative of Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.
Yet, although these occupations drove away the haunting nightmare for minutes at a time, they were impotent to banish it permanently.
The chief trouble was, of course, that her nerves were still shaken by the emotional explosion in which the whole House had been involved the day before. The explosion was the cause of the nightmare. And the nightmare itself, its several metamorphoses and all, had marched in such a logical, well arranged order, that she was greatly tempted to tell it to Lydia Dyson, the novelist, who was a crank on the subject of Freud and dreams.
Lydia, to be sure, would pronounce it a contemptible dream, lamentably short of knives, pitchforks, corks, bottles and other shining symbolic materials. Contemptible or not, she would none the less insist that it must be submitted to a psychoanalyst.
Yes, Lydia Dyson would torment her to be psychoanalyzed. With a smile she recalled the novelist's visit to the Susan B. Anthony House a week ago. Lydia, in search of material for her new novel, The Soul Pirates (expression derived from Cornelia Covert), had set the members of the house to narrating their worst dreams. Then she had beguiled more than half of them into having themselves psychoanalyzed by Aristide Cambeau, an amazingly brilliant speaker whose lectures (at the Ritz—five dollars a ticket!) were the latest social rage, and whose clinic was daily besieged by a long queue of fashionable ladies impatient to have their souls laid bare.
Janet believed she could interpret her dream fully as well as the fascinating Mr. Cambeau.
Her attempt to do so led her to a review of her own recent history.
Seven weeks ago she had returned with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome to the United States. Mrs. Jerome had resumed training her as soon as the Statue of Liberty was sighted. Thus, the good lady reminded her that they had come from England (where plenty of explosive insurrectionary material was lying around) to their own land with its "tendency to normalcy" as a noted politician expressed it. That is, they had come back to the America of the women's vote, the high cost of living, the housing shortage, the unemployment menace, the deportation of radicals and Japanese, the reception of hoards of unhealthy South-European immigrants, the ouija board, the stock market slump and jazz. The same old America! It was reading "Main Street" just then; and Mrs. Jerome opined that all America was reading the book, not because it gave a memorable picture of the soul of a nation in all its drab, desolating mediocrity, but because it gratified the furious national craving to be paid attention to and talked about, it mattered nothing whether in terms of praise, disparagement or abuse.