"How can you sigh so bitterly at such a moment as this?" her husband asked her. The angel could hardly explain, and it almost made a rift between them.
"I wonder," said the analyst on another such occasion, "if this can be connected with your experiences before yon lost your memory. Is it possible your cure is not complete? It almost shakes my faith in my method."
This thought preyed upon his mind until he was on the point of a breakdown. "My work is ruined," said he one day. "I have lost, faith in my great discovery. I am a failure. I shall go downhill. I shall take to drink. Here is a grey hair! What is worse than an old, grey, drunken psychoanalyst, who has lost faith in himself and his science, both of which he believed equal to anything? My poor children, what a father you will have to grow up with! You will have no pleasant home, no education, and probably no shoes. You will have to wait outside saloons. You will get inferiority complexes, and when you are married you will take it out on your unfortunate partners, and they too will have to be psychoanalyzed."
At this the poor young angel gave way altogether. After all, there were only a few weeks left She thought it better to destroy the remnant of her happiness than to ruin the lives of her husband and children. That night she told him all.
"I would never have credited such things," said her husband, "but you, my dear, have made me believe in angels, and from that it is a short step to believing in fiends as well. You have restored my faith in my science, which has frequently been likened to the casting out of devils. Where is he? Can I get a sight of him?"
"All too easily," replied the angel. "Go upstairs a little earlier than usual, and hide yourself in my wardrobe. When I come up and begin to undress, he'll be quite certain to show himself."
"Very well," said her husband. "Perhaps tonight, as it is rather chilly, you need not. . ."
"Oh, my dear," said she, "it is far too late to bother about trifles of that sort."
"You are right," said he, "for after all, I am a psychoanalyst, and therefore broad-minded, and he is only a devil."
He at once went upstairs and concealed himself, and his angelic wife followed him soon after. Just as she had expected, the devil appeared at a certain moment, lying stretched out on the chaise-longue and leering insolently at the angel. He went so far as to give this innocent creature one of his humorous little pinches as she went by. "You're getting thin," said he. "However, you'll soon be back in your old form once we've started our honeymoon. What fun we shall have together! You've no idea how much I've learned in Atlantic City!"
He went on like this for some time. In the end the husband stepped out of the wardrobe and took him by the wrist
"Let go of my wrist!" said the devil, trying to pull himself free, for these old, gross, and sensual devils are like scared and sullen children when a psychoanalyst gets hold of them.
"It is not your wrist that interests me," said the analyst in a tone of lofty detachment. "It's that tail of yours."
"My tail?" muttered old Tom, taken altogether aback. "What about my tail? What's wrong with it?"
"I'm sure it's a very good tail," replied the analyst. "But I imagine you'd like to get rid of it."
"Get rid of my tail?" cried the startled devil. "Why in the name of all that's unholy should I want to do that!"
"Everyone to his taste," said the analyst with a contemptuous shrug. "Did you see any little appendages of that description in Atlantic City?"
"Well, no, as a matter of fact I didn't," replied the crestfallen fiend. The truth is, devils, who suggest so very much to the rest of us, are themselves extremely suggestible. That is how they got that way.
"In my opinion that tail is purely psychic in origin," said the analyst. "And I believe it could be cured without much difficulty."
"Who said I want it cured?" retorted the devil angrily.
"No one said so," replied the man of science in a tranquil tone. "But you have thought so, and tried to suppress the thought. By your own admission you are very pronouncedly a voyeur I'll touch on the disadvantages of that later. At least you have seen what is considered normal and pleasing in a well-formed male, and no doubt you would like to be in the mode."
"I have a good time," said the devil, now very much on the defensive.
The analyst allowed a pitying and incredulous smile to overspread his features. He turned to his wife. "My dear," said he, "I must ask you to leave us alone. The confidences of these twisted and unhappy creatures are sacred."
The angel at once withdrew, closing the door very quietly behind her. The analyst took a seat near the head of the chaise-longue on which the unfortunate devil was lying. "So you think you have a good time?" said he in the gentlest tone imaginable.
I do," responded the fiend defiantly. "And what's more, very soon I expect to have a better one."
"It is a mere hypothesis, of course," said the analyst "It can be nothing more at this early stage of analysis. But I suggest that what you claim as a good time is just a mask for a very profound maladjustment. The physical symptoms are noticeable. You are appallingly overweight, and I suspect that this in turn has produced a heart condition."
"It's true I breathe a little hard now and then," said the devil uneasily.
"Do you mind telling me how old you are?" said the analyst
"Three thousand four hundred and forty," replied the devil.
"I should have thought you at least a thousand years older than that," said the analyst. "However, I don't claim to be infallible. But one thing is quite certain: you were very much a misfit in your original surroundings, otherwise you would not have run away. And now you are trying to run away from analysis. It is a threat to that tail of yours. Consciously, yon know it's a terrible disfigurement, but you are unwilling to give it up."
"Oh, I don't know about that," said the fiend uncertainly.
"Oh, yes, you cling to it as a mark of your devilishness," said the analyst sternly. "And what does this devilishness amount to? I think we shall find it is a protest, arising out of a sense of rejection which may very well date to the actual moment of your becoming a devil. Even human birth is a traumatic experience. How much worse must it be, to be born a poor, rejected devil!"
The wretched fiend shifted his shoulders, pulled at his dewlaps, and showed other signs of distress. Thereupon the analyst drove home the attack, referring to fits of depression, vague fears, a sense of guilt, an inferiority complex, spells of insomnia, a compulsion to eat and drink too much, and psychosomatic aches and pains. In the end the poor devil positively begged to be analyzed; all he asked was that be might be given extra sessions so that the cure could be accomplished more quickly.