“I don’t know, I’m not sure—badly, I think.”
The doctor knew; he had seen the Colonel.
“I want you to try to get rich.”
Floyd had a shock. He looked sharply at the doctor; there was no glare in his eyes, but he was fingering a paper cutter—no, he wasn’t mad—but he was a mind reader. Floyd had been thinking of money—in a vague way, wondering that so many people whose names he had never heard had bobbed up as millionaires.
“The pursuit of wealth may be sordid, but if we succeed, we are compensated by a gratifying sense of self-confidence, authority, power, not speaking of the good we can do with our ‘ill gotten’ gains. As for the spiritual side being starved, well, we don’t think so; if we concentrate on the world of the spirit, it will demoralize us in our practical life, which is our end of it. We must uphold that, for the sake of bankrupt Europe.”
“Doctor, I dreamt last night that I was enormously rich.”
“Good! make it a complex. It will drive more harmful ideas out of your mind. Come and see me again. I am curious to know how my prescription’s going to work....”
Floyd found the Colonel, erect, well satisfied; he had no complexes, he wasn’t married.
“How do I stand?”
The Colonel hesitated.