"I know. Cliff Maculay."
"Such is fame," sighed Cliff. "You know me?"
Ava nodded. "I've met you before," she said. A faint, subdued recollection of her previous meeting with Clifford Maculay stirred her. She recalled, very dimly, the upsurge of emotion, the pounding of her heart, the complete relaxation of defensive mechanism. Something had been started but never finished, before. Now it was all past, gone, and a new day was yet to be born. "Someone gave me a message for you, but I've forgotten it."
"Maybe we can bring it back," chuckled Maculay. He took her by the arm and led her from the room.
Hanson had committed one pardonable error; pardonable because Hanson, for all of his years and his experience, was no worker of miracles, to whom nothing is hidden, and who can be called omniscient.
For all of his experience in wending his way through the hidden recesses of the labyrinth we call the human mind, Hanson did not know everything and would have been the first to admit this honestly. But he did know that the trouble with both Maculay and Ava Longacre laid in the subsurfaces of the conscious mind. Blocks, inhibitions, and fears instilled as a youth had driven Maculay to seek his excellence in mathematics as a goal rather than as the means to the normal goal of a happy, balanced life. In the filing-cabinet of the mind, however; in the subconscious mind of Clifford Maculay was all of the data of the life he should have led, held there subdued by the blocks of the conscious mind. Hanson had opened the doorway by removing these blocks, and he had done a fine job.
In much the same fashion he had removed the blocks and impediments from Ava Longacre's mind.
Both had suffered from too puritanical an upbringing. In the long distance that lies between white saint and black evil, there is a long dimension lying just below center that is the despair of reformers and do-gooders. This region contains many people and many ideals that are mal in dictu. Some impractical reformer had decided, for instance, that liquor is to be abhorred; ergo it is against the desires of society for a man to take a drink. Just one. The idea is, of course, to create a race of saints and Little Lord Fauntleroy sweetness—which probably wouldn't last out the century since the desire to poke someone in the nose for stepping on your rights—or your toe—is the same belligerency that has made mankind fight its way up from the swamps to seek the stars.