which ascribes the climbing as difficult at first, and as becoming easier at the end of the hill, made me think while it was being told of the well-known masterful introduction to Sappho by A. Daudet. Here a young man carries the girl whom he loves upstairs—she is at first as light as a feather; but the higher he mounts the more heavily she weighs upon his arm, and this scene symbolises a course of events by recounting which Daudet tries to warn young men not to waste serious affection upon girls of humble origin or of questionable past.[1] Although I knew that my patient had recently had a love affair with a lady of the theatre, and had broken it off, I did not expect to find that the interpretation which had occurred to me was correct. Moreover, the situation in Sappho was the reverse of that in the dream; in the latter the climbing was difficult at the beginning and easy later on; in the novel the symbolism serves only if what was at first regarded as easy finally turns out to be a heavy load. To my astonishment, the patient remarked that the interpretation corresponded closely to the plot of a play which he had seen on the evening before at the theatre. The play was called Round about Vienna, and treated of the career of a girl who is respectable at first but later goes over to the demi-monde, who has affairs with persons in high places, thus "climbing," but finally "goes down" faster and faster. This play had reminded him of another entitled From Step to Step, in the advertisement of which had appeared a stairway consisting of several steps.
Now to continue the interpretation. The actress with whom he had had his most recent affair, a complicated one, had lived in X-street. There is no inn in this street. However, while he was spending a part of the summer in Vienna for the sake of the lady, he had lodged (German abgestiegen = stopped, literally stepped off) at a little hotel in the neighbourhood. As he was leaving the hotel he said to the cab-driver, "I am glad I didn't get any vermin anyway (which incidentally is one of his phobias). Whereupon the cab-driver answered: "How could anybody stop there! It isn't a hotel at all, it's really nothing but a road-house!"
