Neale did not need the sound of Marise’s voice to know how she hated this.  She said, rather shortly for her, as though she didn’t want to say a word about it, and yet couldn’t leave it uncorrected, “Not exactly.  I don’t dream I’m the leaf on the current.  I dream I am the current myself, part of it.  I’m the wind, not the bird blown by it; the wave itself; it’s too hard to explain.”

“Do you still have those dreams once in a while, Marisette, and do you still love them as much?”

“Oh yes, sometimes.”

“And have you ever had the same sensation in your waking moments?  I remember so well you used to say that was what you longed for, some experience in real life that would make you have that glorious sense of irresistible forward movement.  We used to think,” said Eugenia, “that perhaps falling in love would give it to you.”

“No,” said Marise.  “I’ve never felt it, out of my dreams.”

Neale was sorry he had elected to stay in the study.  If he were out there now, he could change the conversation, come to her rescue.  Couldn’t Eugenia see that she was bothering Marise!

“What do you suppose Freud would make out of such dreams?” asked Eugenia, evidently of Marsh.

“Why, it sounds simple enough to me,” said Marsh, and Neale was obliged to hand it to him that the very sound of his voice had a living, real, genuine accent that was a relief after Eugenia.  He didn’t talk half-chewed and wholly undigested nonsense, the way Eugenia did.  Neale had heard enough of his ideas to know that he didn’t agree with a word the man said, but at least it was a vital and intelligent personality talking.

“Why, it sounds simple enough to me.  Americans have fadded the thing into imbecility, so that the very phrase has become such a bromide one hates to pronounce it.  But of course the commonplace that all dreams are expressions of suppressed desires is true.  And it’s very apparent that Mrs. Crittenden’s desire is a very fine one for freedom and power and momentum.  She’s evidently not a back-water personality.  Though one would hardly need psycho-analysis to guess that!” He changed the subject as masterfully as Neale could have done.  “See here, Mrs. Crittenden, that Tschaikowsky whetted my appetite for more.  Don’t you feel like playing again?”

The idea came over Neale, and in spite of his uneasy irritation, it tickled his fancy, that possibly Marsh found Eugenia just as deadly as he did.

Marise jumped at the chance to turn the talk, for in an instant the piano began to chant again, not Tschaikowsky, Neale noted, but some of the new people whom Marise was working over lately.  He couldn’t understand a note of them, nor keep his mind on them, nor even try to remember their names.  He had been able to get just as far as Debussy and no further, he thought whimsically, before his brain-channels hardened in incipient middle-age.

He plunged into Trevelyan and the heart-quickening ups and downs of battle.