Her name was Cistercia Ugler (Cisty to her friends) and she looked very upset as she entered the Professor’s consulting room.
The first thing the Professor noted was that the girl was very well dressed and that her manner indicated a background of wealth and breeding. She might even be related to Howitzer Ugler, the millionaire munitions king, the Professor thought to himself.
The next thing he noticed was that she had a face like the back end of a bus. However, this was the least important of his considerations. As she took her place on his couch, he made some quick calculations in his mind. Two sessions a week for three years would come to a tidy sum. Enough to take care of at least fifty percent of the alimony he was paying his third ex-wife. Humming a little tune, he sat by her head with pad and pencil and asked her to talk about anything that came into her mind.
She hesitated at first, biting the end of the tiny handkerchief that was crumpled in her hand, then she blurted out: “Professor, I have a terrible obsession that simply will not leave me. I have an overwhelming desire to strangle my stepsister.”
“Aha!” the Professor exclaimed. “Please go on, tell me more.”
“Her name is Ella Rednic. She is a very pretty girl and, until recently, she used to live with us. You see, her mother died at childbirth and her father, Gustav Rednic, overcome with grief and desperate at the thought of having to bring up a little girl single-handedly, married the first woman he set eyes on—my mother, who was then the private secretary of Howitzer Ugler, the munitions king. She was visiting Ugler at the same hospital where he had been taken with a mild concussion following a small explosion in his factory.
“Rednic was an extremely handsome man and my mother fell for him instantly when she saw him standing so sad and forlorn in the hospital corridor. She felt even more sympathy for him when she heard his wife had died and he would have to take care of little Ella all by himself. In no time at all they were married and my mother wangled a cushy job for him at the munitions plant.
“A week later, another explosion at the factory killed Rednic and it was my mother’s turn to look sad and forlorn. Howitzer Ugler was a very ugly man but he had a kind heart and lots of money. So when he proposed to my mother she accepted immediately.”
“Aha!” the Professor exclaimed, “and you are the issue of that marriage.”
“I am,” Cisty Ugler admitted, “and I have a sister too, who is just as ugly as I am.”
“Come, come now,” the Professor protested, “you may not be a Jean Harlow, Miss Ugler, but you have, you have…er, how shall I say…” he fumbled for words, looking desperately for some believable compliment to pay her. “You have a lot of allure! That’s it! Allure. You have hidden qualities, I am sure, that are far more important. After all, beauty is only skin deep.”
Miss Ugler smiled wanly. “You are very kind, Professor. But in spite of all our millions, my sister and I have reached the ripe old age of twenty-one and twenty-two and no suitor has yet found those hidden qualities. We had our hearts set on one. The prize plum of the Palatinate. But who d’you think grabbed him? None other than Ella Rednic, our hated stepsister. That’s why I’m so mad I could kill her.”
“Tsk, tsk,” the Professor chided, “you must not be like that my dear. You and your sister are so young. Your Prince Charming may yet turn up, you know. You must think positively. Wanting to kill your stepsister won’t help at all. You must say to yourself ‘every hour, every day I am getting more and more beautiful and the man who will fall in love with me and marry me is just around the corner.'”
Miss Ugler snorted. “Don’t kid yourself, Professor. Every hour and every day tnat passes 1 am getting uglier and uglier and the only Prince Charming in our Palatinate is now happily ensconced in the Electoral Palace at Frankenthal, married to none other than that little bitch, Ella. And all because my feet and my sister’s feet are too big.”
The Professor’s eyes widened. Maybe she was crazier than he had thought at first. Perhaps he should put her on three sessions a week. He made a few more mental calculations. That would cover sixty-five percent of his third ex-wife’s alimony. He scribbled “megapodal syndrome” on his pad and asked her to go on.
“The story may sound fantastic to you, Professor, but this is how it happened. The Elector holds an annual ball at the Frankenthal Palace every year. Ella never went to these balls because my mother hated her guts and kept her in the kitchen most of the time, scouring the pans, cleaning the grate, and all that sort of thing. She had dishpan hands, housemaid’s knees and generally looked a mess. What’s more, she couldn’t possibly go to the ball because she had nothing to wear.
“So you can imagine our surprise when at last year’s ball, who do we see prancing around the dance floor with the Prince but Ella, in a beautiful pink organza dress and fancy slippers, looking like Ginger Rogers in ‘Roberta’ and having the time of her life.
“I tried to see her after the dance but she had disappeared. When we got home, she was fast asleep in her cot in the kitchen still in her filthy old dress, dishpan hands, housemaid’s knees and all. Nothing like the ethereal creature we had seen at the dance. So we came to the conclusion that it must have been someone who looked very much like her and thought nothing more about it.
“A few days later, who should come calling but the Prince himself. He was holding a slipper and I immediately recognized it as one of the slippers the girl at the ball had been wearing. He told us he was looking for that very same girl. Apparently she had left the dance floor at the stroke of midnight and, in her haste, had lost her slipper. I said to the Prince: ‘And you’re going to all this trouble for one lousy slipper? Why don’t you put an ad in the paper?'”
‘You don’t understand,’ the Prince replied, ‘I’m looking for the girl who owns this slipper because I’m madly in love with her and I want to marry her. I was in a daze when I was dancing with her and I don’t even remember what she looks like. But if the slipper fits, that’s my girl.'”
“I personally thought the Prince must be a little soft in the head but my mother insisted that my sister and I should try on the slipper to see if it fit. Of course, it didn’t. It was several sizes too small. The Prince was just about to take his leave when he saw Ella peering around the door. She had just fed the pigs and she was mucky all over. My mother started to cuff her and tell her to get out of there when the Prince stopped her. He made Ella wash her feet and tried the slipper on her. It fit perfectly.
“When my mother saw the tender glow in his eyes as he rose to his feet and looked lovingly at Ella, she broke in and said: ‘Your Highness, you must be wrong. Ella did not go to the ball at all. She couldn’t have. She had nothing to wear and the Palace is miles away from here.’
“But the Prince wasn’t listening. He took Ella with him, married her a month later, and we didn’t even get an invitation to the wedding. My sister and I also got a beating from my mother for having such big feet—as if it was our fault!
“Ever since,” Miss Ugler went on, “I’ve had this awful obsession about wanting to kill Ella. I don’t sleep, I don’t eat, and I feel as if I am being possessed by some evil force that will not go away until I have strangled my stepsister. You must help me, Professor. I cannot go on like this!”
“Have you talked to your mother and father about this obsession?” Professor Kopfschrinker asked.
“I can’t communicate with my mother at all. She keeps going on about my feet. My father died a year ago. There was another explosion at the factory.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” the Professor murmured. Then his sharp mind worked rapidly as he realized that with the death of Howitzer Ugler, the munitions king’s fortune was now shared by the widow and the two daughters. And she had mentioned millions earlier on in the session. He forgot about the three sessions a week and decided on another line of approach.
“Look here, Miss Ugler,” he said, “or may I call you Cisty?” he added, taking her hand in his. He noticed she made no effort to withdraw it.
“Cisty,” he said, “your hostility towards Ella is an outward-directed substitute for the subconscious hatred you have developed for yourself, because you think you are not beautiful enough and for your feet, because you think they are too big and were responsible for your missing the chance of a lifetime. You are twenty-two years old and you have natural desires which have not been fulfilled. With your position in society you have always subconsciously entertained the possibility that you might marry the Prince. He paid no attention to you at the ball but danced with Ella instead. Then he came to your house, gave you a chance with the slipper, and Ella again won the day. So, consciously, you have directed all your hatred towards Ella, but subconsciously, your real self does not hate her at all. You hate yourself and your feet. Do you understand? Do you see it now?”
Miss Ugler pondered for a while, then nodded. “What should I do?” she asked.
“You must say to yourself, as I advised you before, ‘every hour and every day I am getting more and more beautiful and I love my feet. They may be a little big, but they are very functional and I love them very much.'”
“Is that all? Will that cure me?”
“That and something else. Will you have dinner with me tonight?” the Professor asked, with a gleam in his eye.
Miss Ugler fluttered her lashes and blushed. Then she looked at the Professor in a new light. He was at least twenty years older than she was but he was quite handsome and seemed to be someone she could lean on, which she needed now, what with her father dead and her mother going on about her feet.
“All right,” she said. “Thank you very much.”
That night, as they danced to the strains of a Viennese waltz in one of the city’s most exclusive supper clubs, Cisty said to her new-found beau: “What I can’t understand is how Ella ever did get to the Prince’s ball, if it was indeed she who was there.”
“It’s all very simple, my dear,” the Professor said. “She must have wanted to go to that ball very much and must have been concentrating on it very hard so she probably went into a trance, had an out-of-body experience, materialized at the ball, organza dress, slippers and all, and danced with the Prince. When she went back, everything dematerialized and she was as she had been before.”
“And the slipper the Prince found?”
“It stayed materialized until the Prince found her physical self. I’m sure that if you looked for it now you’d never find it.”
