So, when the rest of her children arrived, Mrs. Hilary was ready for them.

They embraced her in turn; Pamela, capable, humorous and intelligent, the very type of the professional woman at her best, but all the time preferring Frances Carr, anxious about her because she was overworking and run down; Nan, her extravagant present in her hands, on fire to protect her mother against old age, depression and Rosalind, yet knowing too how soon she herself would be smouldering with irritation; Gilbert, spare and cynical, writer of plays and literary editor of the Weekly Critic, and with him his wife Rosalind, whom Mrs. Hilary had long since judged as a voluptuous rake who led men on and made up unseemly stories and her lovely face, but who insisted on coming to The Gulls with Gilbert to see his adorable mother.  Rosalind, who was always taking up things—­art, or religion, or spiritualism, or young men—­and dropping them when they bored her, had lately taken up psycho-analysis.  She was studying what she called her mother-in-law’s “case,” looking for and finding complexes in her past which should account for her somewhat unbalanced present.

“I’ve never had complexes,” Mrs. Hilary would declare, indignantly, as if they had been fleas or worse, and indeed when Rosalind handled them they were worse, much.  From Rosalind Mrs. Hilary got the most unpleasant impression possible (which is to say a good deal) of psycho-analysts.  “They have only one idea, and that is a disgusting one,” she would assert, for she could only rarely and with difficulty see more than one idea in anything, particularly when it was a disgusting one.  Her mind was of that sort—­tenacious, intolerant, and not many-sided.  That was where (partly where) she fell foul of her children, who saw sharply and clearly all around things and gave to each side its value.  They knew Mrs. Hilary to be a muddled bigot, whose mind was stuffed with concrete instances and insusceptible of abstract reason.  If anyone had asked her what she knew of psycho-analysis, she would have replied, in effect, that she knew Rosalind, and that was enough, more than enough, of psycho-analysis for her.  She had also looked into Freud, and rightly had been disgusted.

“A man who spits deliberately onto his friends’ stairs, on purpose to annoy the servants ... that is enough, the rest follows.  The man is obviously a loathsome and indecent vulgarian.  It comes from being a German, no doubt.”  Which settled that; and if anyone murmured “An Austrian,” she would say, “It comes to the same thing, in questions of breeding.”  Mrs. Hilary, like Grandmama, settled people and things very quickly and satisfactorily.

They all sat in the front garden after lunch and looked out over the wonderful shining sea.  Grandmama sat in her wheeled chair, Tchekov’s Letters on her knees.  She had made Mrs. Hilary get this book from Mudie’s because she had read favourable reviews of it by Gilbert and Nan.  Grandmama was a cleverish old lady, cleverer than her daughter.