FullReads

“So kind of you to say it,” murmured the Adept. “I’m sorry you must go, but really I have other appointments. Please come again–with your friend. Good-bye.”

“What do you think of her?” asked Mrs. Caswell on the street.

“Very clever,” answered Constance dubiously.

Mrs. Caswell looked up quickly. “You don’t like her?”

“To tell the truth,” confessed Constance quietly, “I have had too much experience in Wall Street myself to trust to a clairvoyant.”

They had scarcely reached the corner before Constance again had that peculiar feeling which some psychologists have noted, of being stared at. She turned, but saw no one. Still the feeling persisted. She could stand it no longer.

“Don’t think me crazy, Mildred,” she said, “but I just have a desire to walk back a block.”

Constance had turned suddenly. As she glanced keenly about she was aware of a familiar figure gazing into the window of an art store across the street. He had stopped so that although his back was turned he could, by a slight shift of his position, still see by means of a mirror in the window what was going on across the street behind him.

One look was enough. It was Drummond, the detective. What did it mean?

Neither woman said much as they rode uptown, and parted on the respective floors of their apartment house. Still Constance could not get out of her head the recollection of the dream doctor and of Drummond.

Restless, she determined that night to go down to the Public Library and see whether any of the books at the clairvoyant’s were on the shelves. Fortunately she found some, found indeed that they were not all, as she had half suspected, the works of fakers but that quite a literature had been built up around the new psychology of dreams.

Deeply she delved into the fascinating subjects that had been opened by the studies of the famous Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, and as she read she found that she began to understand much about Mrs. Caswell –and, with a start, about her own self.

At first she revolted against the unpleasant feature of the new dream philosophy–the irresistible conclusion that all humanity, underneath the shell, is sensuous or sensual in nature, that practically all dreams portray some delight of the senses and that sexual dreams are a large proportion of all visions. But the more she thought of it, the more clearly was she able to analyze Mrs. Caswell’s dream and to get back at the causes of it, in the estrangement from her husband and perhaps the brutality of his ignorance of woman. And then, too, there was Drummond. What was he doing in the case?

She did not see Mildred Caswell again until the following afternoon. But then she seemed unusually bright in contrast with the depression of the day before. Constance was not surprised. Her intuition told her that something had happened and she hardly needed to guess that Mrs. Caswell had followed the advice of the clairvoyant and had been to see the wonderful Mr. Davies, to whom the mysteries of the stock market were an open book.

“Have you had any other dreams?” asked Constance casually.

“Yes,” replied Mildred, “but not like the one that depressed me. Last night I had a very pleasant dream. It seemed that I was breakfasting with Mr. Davies. I remember that there was a hot coal fire in the grate. Then suddenly a messenger came in with news that United Traction had advanced twenty points. Wasn’t it strange?”

Constance said nothing. In fact it did not seem strange to her at all. The strange thing to her, now that she was a sort of amateur dream reader herself, was that Mrs. Caswell did not seem to see the real import of her own dream.

“You have seen Mr. Davies to-day?” Constance ventured.

Mrs. Caswell laughed. “I wasn’t going to tell you. You seemed so set against speculating in Wall Street. But since you ask me, I may as well admit it.”