"Will you walk into my parlor?
Said the spider to the fly;
It's the prettiest little parlor,
That ever you did spy."
The psycho-analyst says that the subconscious, which is always with us, working, never is actually foolish; it is interpretive, if you have the insight to understand it. Well, this was my subconscious expression. It was interpretive, true enough.
Now the spider, in my complex, was not that old woman; Doris was doing the spider in my dream.
Upon becoming aware that, though I lay on the edge of a red-plush parlor, I was not physically a fly, I felt over myself to find what was missing.
There should be something hard and heavy and extremely important under my coat in my right inside pocket. That region was soft and pliable now. Plates were lacking; that was it,—nice, new, counterfeit plates which I'd procured from under Doris Janvier's lingerie in that Pullman on the Century and which I'd put in my pocket to return to her here at Number 120 Cheron Street with an idea of evangelizing her out of using them.