“You wouldn’t, I expect, like me to analyse you,” said Rosalind.  “Not a course, I mean, but just once, to advise you better whom to go to.  It’d have the advantage, anyhow, that I’d do it free.  Anyone else will charge you three guineas at the least.”

“I don’t think,” said Mrs. Hilary, “that relations—­or connections—­ought to do one another.  No, I’d better go to someone I don’t know, if you’ll give me the name and address.”

“I thought you’d probably rather,” Rosalind said in her slow, soft, cruel voice, like a cat’s purr.  “Well, I’ll write down the address for you.  It’s Dr. Evans:  he’ll probably pass you on to someone down at the seaside, if he considers you a suitable case for treatment.”

He would; of course he would.  Mrs. Hilary felt no doubt as to that.

Gilbert came in from the British Museum.  He looked thin and nervous and sallow amid all the splendour.  He kissed his mother, thinking how queer and untidy she looked, a stranger and pilgrim in Rosalind’s drawing-room.  He too might look there at times a stranger and pilgrim, but at least, if not voluptuous, he was neat.  He glanced proudly and yet ironically from his mother to his magnificent wife, taking in and understanding the supra-normal redundancies of her make-up.

“Rosalind,” said Mrs. Hilary, knowing that it would be less than useless to ask Rosalind to keep her secret, “has been recommending me a psycho-analyst doctor.  I think it is worth while trying if I can get my insomnia cured that way.”

“My dear mother!  After all your fulminations against the tribe!  Well, I think you’re quite right to give it a trial.  Why don’t you get Rosalind to take you on?”

The fond pride in his voice!  Yet there was in his eyes, as they rested for a moment on Rosalind, something other than fond pride; something more like mockery.

Mrs. Hilary got up to go, and fired across the rich room the one shot in her armoury.

“I believe,” she said, “that Rosalind prefers chiefly to take men patients.  She wouldn’t want to be bored with an old woman.”

The shot drove straight into Gilbert’s light-strung sensitiveness.  Shell-shocked officers; any other officers; anything male, presentable and passably young; these were Rosalind’s patients; he knew it, and everyone else knew it.  For a moment his smile was fixed into the deliberate grin of pain.  Mrs. Hilary saw it, saw Gilbert far back down the years, a small boy standing up to punishment with just that brave, nervous grin.  Sensitive, defiant, vulnerable, fastidiously proud—­so Gilbert had always been and always would be.

Remorsefully she clung to him.

“Come and see me out, dearest boy” (so she called him, though Jim was really that)—­and she ignored Rosalind’s slow, unconcerned protest against her last remark.  “Why, mother, you know I asked to do you” ... but she couldn’t prevent Rosalind from seeing her out too, hanging her about with all the ridiculous parcels, kissing her on both cheeks.