Whether it was anger or passion that uttered the demand Joan didn’t know. Perhaps it was merely her old insatiable desire to keep Hugh’s desire from weakening. Perhaps sometime—perhaps even quite soon—she would know and understand herself. That was her hope. For she was in the very middle of being psychoanalyzed. Her doctor had been on the Riviera and in Bermuda, stopping at hotels conveniently near to her own, combining work with vacation the past few months. Her sudden and unexpected return had occurred only because another patient with whom he had supposedly finished treatment had backslid and sent him an urgent _S O S_ from New York. Thereupon, Doctor Steiner had persuaded Mrs. Nevin that the time had come for her to meet her problems face to face, with no further evasion. And Hugh was the chief of these problems.
The question was: Was she in love with Hugh Weyman enough to marry him? Doctor Steiner had undertaken to help her discover the answer to this question by means of a minute and indefatigable research into her nightly dreams. This process necessitated a two-hour daily séance with himself,—the two hours being sacredly dedicated to an intimate hashing over of Joan’s emotional life and history.
Hugh, so far, knew nothing of this. But his mother had known from the beginning and been interested and sympathetic. Soon now, in all probability, Joan would decide to talk about it with Hugh himself. For while she had been able to hold him in a state of uncertainty and loyalty during the years since her husband had died, her excuses for indecision were beginning to wear too thin, even to herself. Besides, Hugh had not written to her once during her entire absence this winter, in spite of her having sent him two or three very interesting and even affectionate letters. That he was trying to gain his emotional independence was evident to her even without Doctor Steiner’s elucidations. His pride was becoming too deeply involved.
When she took him into her confidence about this business of being psychoanalyzed she would have to explain how Doctor Steiner had discovered that she, Joan, was so complicated an individual, so highly organized emotionally as well as physically, that things were not nearly so simple and straight for her as for more ordinary and perhaps fortunate persons,—people like Hugh himself, for instance, who knew so definitely what he wanted, and had no agonizing conflicts between his impulses and his actions. When her analysis was completed, she would tell him, but not till then, she might be able to give herself to a husband in the whole-hearted and elemental way which Hugh’s type would demand in a wife. And she might not. The final word really must rest on Doctor Steiner’s findings.