Mrs. Hilary was certainly shy of the subject, for that reason or others.  When she felt too shy of it, Mr. Cradock let her change it.  “It may be true,” she would say, “but it’s very terrible, and I would rather not dwell on it.”

So he would let her dwell instead on the early days of her married life, or on the children’s childhood, or on her love for Neville and Jim, or on her impatience with her mother.

2

They were happy little times, stimulating, cosy little times.  They spoke straight to the heart, easing it of its weight of tragedy.  A splendid man, Mr. Cradock, with his shrewd, penetrating sympathy, his kind firmness.  He would listen with interest to everything; the sharp words she had had with Grandmama, troubles with the maids, the little rubs of daily life (and what a rubbing business life is, to be sure!) as well as to profounder, more tragic accounts of desolation, jealousy, weariness and despair.  He would say “Your case is a very usual one,” so that she did not feel ashamed of being like that.  He reduced it all, dispassionately and yet not unsympathetically, and with clear scientific precision, to terms of psychical and physical laws.  He trained his patient to use her mind and her will, as well as to remember her dreams and to be shocked at nothing that they signified.

Mrs. Hilary would wake each morning, or during the night, and clutch at the dream which was flying from her, clutch and secure it, and make it stand and deliver its outlines to her.  She was content with outlines; it was for Mr. Cradock to supply the interpretation.  Sometimes, if Mrs. Hilary couldn’t remember any dreams, he would supply, according to a classic precedent, the dream as well as the interpretation.  But on the whole, deeply as she revered and admired him, Mrs. Hilary preferred to remember her own dreams; what they meant was bad enough, but the meaning of the dreams that Mr. Cradock told her she had dreamt was beyond all words....  That terrible Unconscious!  Mrs. Hilary disliked it excessively; she felt rather as if it were a sewer, sunk beneath an inadequate grating.

But from Mr. Cradock she put up with hearing about it.  She would have put up with anything.  He was so steadying and so wonderful.  He enabled her to face life with a new poise, a fresh lease of strength and vitality.  She told Grandmama so.  Grandmama said “Yes, my dear, I’ve observed it in you.  It sounds to me an unpleasing business, but it is obviously doing you good, so far.  I only wish it may last.  The danger may be reaction, after you have finished the course and lost touch with this young man.” (Mr. Cradock was forty-five, but Grandmama, it must be remembered, was eighty-four.) “You will have to guard against that.  In a way it was a pity you didn’t take up church-going instead; religion lasts.”

“And these quackeries do not,” Grandmama finished her sentence to herself, not wishing to be discouraging.