“Sometimes.”

“Tell me some of them, please.”

“Oh, the usual things, I suppose.  Packing; missing trains; meeting people; and just nonsense that means nothing.  All the usual things, that everyone dreams about.”

At each thing she said he nodded, and scribbled with his pencil.  “Quite,” he said, “quite.  They’re bad enough in meaning, the dreams you’ve mentioned.  I don’t suppose you’d care at present to hear what they symbolise....  The dreams you haven’t mentioned are doubtless worse.  And those you don’t even recall are worst of all.  Your unconscious is, very naturally and properly, frightened of them....  Well, we must end all that, or you’ll never sleep as you should.  Psycho-analysis will cure these dreams; first it will make you remember them, then you’ll talk them out and get rid of them.”

“Dreams,” said Mrs. Hilary.  “Well, they may be important.  But it’s my whole life....”

“Precisely.  I was coming to that.  Of course you can’t cure sleeplessness until you have cured the fundamental things that are wrong with your life.  Now, if you please, tell me all you can about yourself.”

Here was the wonderful moment.  Mrs. Hilary drew a long breath, and told him.  A horrid (she felt that somehow he was rather horrid) little man with furtive eyes that wouldn’t meet hers—­(and he wasn’t quite a gentleman, either, but still, he wanted to hear all about her) he was listening attentively, drinking it in.  Not watching tennis while she talked, like Barry Briscoe in the garden.  Ah, she could go on and on, never tired; it was like swimming in warm water.

He would interrupt her with questions.  Which had she preferred, her father or her mother?  Well, perhaps on the whole her father.  He nodded; that was the right answer; the other he would have quietly put aside as one of the deliberate inaccuracies so frequently practised by his patients.  “You can leave out the perhaps.  There’s no manner of doubt about it, you know.”  Lest he should say (instead of only looking it) that she had been in love with her good father and he with her, Mrs. Hilary hurried on.  She had a chaste mind, and knew what these Freudians were.  It would, she thought (not knowing her doctor and how it would have come to the same thing, only he would have thought her a more pronounced case, because of the deception), have been wiser to have said that she had preferred her mother, but less truthful, and what she was enjoying now was an orgy of truth-telling.  She got on to her marriage, and how intensely Richard had loved her.  He tried for a moment to be indecent about love and marriage, but in her deep excitement she hardly noticed him, but swept on to the births of the children, and Jim’s croup.

“I see,” he said presently, “that you prefer to avoid discussing certain aspects of life.  You obviously have a sex complex.”