"There's no mystery about this generation," Fanny would say.
"Why should there be?" Norma would say, and would stamp out again, and would be heard hailing the young man of the minute, "We're considered minus on romance, Bill"; and ten of them would get into a car intended for four and drive away, looking like a basketful of puppies.
But about little Evie's love affairs there was some mystery. Aunt Georgy did not know that Evie had ever spoken to the mayor--a middle-aged banker of great wealth--and yet one day when he came to tell Miss Hadley about the museum he told her instead about how Evie had refused to marry him, and how unhappy he was. The nice young clergyman, too, who preached so interestingly and pleased the parish in every detail, was thinking of getting himself transferred to a city in California because the sight of an attentive but unattainable Evie in the front pew every Sunday almost broke his heart.
Aunt Georgy exonerated Evie from blame as far as the mayor was concerned, but she wasn't so sure about the Reverend Mr. Gordon.
"Evie," she said, "did you try to enmesh that nice-looking man of God?"
"I don't get anywhere if I try, Aunt Georgy," she answered. "It has to come of itself or not at all. If Norma sees a man she fancies she swims out after him like a Newfoundland dog. But I have to sit on the shore until the tide washes something up at my feet. I don't always like what it washes up either."
The simile amused Aunt Georgy, but the more she reflected the more she doubted its accuracy. Those tides that washed things up--Evie had some mysterious control of them, whether she knew it or not. Evie's method and Norma's differed enormously in technic, but wasn't the elemental aggression about the same?
Life in Jefferson was never more interesting to Aunt Georgy than when psychoanalysis swept over them. Of course, they had all known about it, and read Freud, or articles about Freud; but the whole subject was revived and made personal by the arrival of Lisburn. Lisburn was not a doctor of medicine but of philosophy. He was an assistant professor of psychology in a New York college. He had written his dissertation on The Unconscious as Portrayed in Poetic Images. With an astonishing erudition he brought all poetry from Homer to Edna St. Vincent Millay into line with the new psychology. Besides this, he was an exceedingly handsome young man--tall, dark, decided, and a trifle offhand and contemptuous in his manner. What girl could ask more? Norma did not ask a bit more. The moment she saw him she--in Evie's language--swam out after him. She met him at dinner one evening, and the next day her conversation was all about dreams and fixations and inhibitions. Mothers began to assemble rapidly about the blue satin sofa. Craps had been vulgar, the shimmy immoral, but this was the worst of all.