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Page 55
He paused. She had been watching him searchingly. She was determined
not to let him justify himself first.
"Mr. Caswell," she persisted in a low, earnest tone, "don't be so
sure that there is nothing in this dream, business. Before you read
me those reports from Mr. Drummond, let me finish."
Forest Caswell almost dropped them in surprise.
"Dreams," she continued, seeing her advantage, "are wishes, either
suppressed or expressed. Sometimes the dream is frank and shows an
expressed wish. Other times it shows a suppressed wish, or a wish
which in its fulfilment in the dream is disguised or distorted.
"You are the cause of your wife's dreams. She feels in them anxiety.
And, according to the modern psychologists who have studied dreams
carefully and scientifically, fear and anxiety represent love
repressed or suppressed."
She paused to emphasize the point, glad to note that he was
following her.
"That clairvoyant," she went on, "has found out the truth. True, it
may not have been the part of wisdom for Mildred to have gone to her
in the first place. I pass over that. I do not know whether you or
she was most to blame at the start. But that woman, in the guise of
being her friend, has played on every string of your wife's lonely
heart, which you have wrung until it vibrates.
"Then," she hastened on, "came your precious friend Drummond,
Drummond who has, no doubt, told you a pack of lies about me. You
see that!"
She had flung down on the table a cigarette which she had managed to
get at Madame Cassandra's.
"Smoke it."
He lighted it gingerly, took a puff or two, puckered his face,
frowned, and rubbed the lighted end on the fireplace to extinguish
it.
"What is it?" he asked suspiciously.
"Hashish," she answered tersely. "Things were not going fast enough
to suit either Madame Cassandra or Drummond. Madame Cassandra helped
along the dreams by a drug noted for its effect on the passions.
More than that," added Constance, leaning over toward him and
catching his eye, "Madame Cassandra was working in league with a
broker, as so many of the fakers do. Drummond knew it, whether he
told you the truth about it or not. That broker was a swindler named
Davies."
She was watching the effect on him. She saw that he had been
reserving this for a last shot at her, that he realized she had
stolen his own ammunition and appropriated it to herself.
"They were only too glad when Drummond approached them. There you
are, three against that poor little woman--no, four, including
yourself. Perhaps she was foolish. But it was not so much to her
discredit as to those who cast her adrift when she had a natural
right to protection. Here was a woman with passions which she
herself did not understand, and a little money--alone. Her case
appealed to me. I knew her dreams. I studied them."
Caswell was listening in amazement. "It is dangerous to be with a
person who pays attention to such little things," he said.
Evidently Drummond himself must have been listening. The door buzzer
sounded and he stepped in, perhaps to bolster up his client in case
he should be weakening.
As he met Constance's eye he smiled superciliously and was about to
speak. But she did not give him time even to say good evening.
"Ask him," she cried, her eyes flashing, for she realized that it
had been part of the plan to confront her, perhaps worm out of her
just enough to confirm Drummond's own story to Caswell, "ask him to
tell the truth--if he is capable of it--not the truth that will make
a good daily report of a hired shadow who colors his report the way
he thinks his client desires it, but the real truth."
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