“Of course, of course.  Don’t you find that in all your patients?  Surely we may take that for granted....”  She allowed him his sex complex, knowing that Freudians without it would be like children deprived of a precious toy; for her part she was impatient to get back to Jim, her life’s chief passion.  The Oedipus complex, of course he would say it was; what matter, if he would let her talk about it?  And Neville.  It was strange to have a jealous passion for one’s daughter.  But that would, he said, be an extension of the ego complex—­quite simple really.

She came to the present.

“I feel that life has used me up and flung me aside like a broken tool.  I have no further relation to life, nor it to me.  I have spent myself and been spent, and now I am bankrupt.  Can you make me solvent again?”

She liked that as she said it.

He scribbled away, like a mouse scrabbling.

“Yes.  Oh yes.  There is no manner of doubt about it.  None whatever.  If you are perfectly frank, you can be cured.  You can be adjusted to life.  Every age in human life has its own adjustment to make, its own relation to its environment to establish.  All that repressed libido must be released and diverted....  You have some bad complexes, which must be sublimated....”

It sounded awful, the firm way he said it, like teeth or appendixes which must be extracted.  But Mrs. Hilary knew it wouldn’t be like that really, but delightful and luxurious, more like a Turkish bath.

“You must have a course,” he told her.  “You are an obvious case for a course of treatment.  St. Mary’s Bay?  Excellent.  There is a practising psycho-analyst there now.  You should have an hour’s treatment twice a week, to be really effective....  You would prefer a man, I take it?”

He shot his eyes at her for a moment, in statement, not in enquiry.  Well he knew how much she would prefer a man.  She murmured assent.  He rose.  The hour was over.

“How much will the course be?” she asked.

“A guinea an hour, Dr. Cradock charges.  He is very cheap.”

“Yes, I see.  I must think it over.  And you?”

He told her his fee, and she blenched, but paid it.  She was not rich, but it had been worth while.  It was a beginning.  It had opened the door into a new and richer life.  St. Mary’s Bay was illumined in her thoughts, instead of being drab and empty as before.  Sublimated complexes twinkled over it like stars.  Freed libido poured electrically about it.  And Dr. Cradock, she felt, would be more satisfactory as a doctor than this man, who affected her with a faint nausea when he looked at her, though he seldom did so.

2

Windover too was illumined.  She could watch almost calmly Neville talking to Grandmama, wheeling her round the garden to look at the borders, for Grandmama was a great gardener.

Then Jim came down for a week-end, and it was as if the sun had risen on Surrey.  He sat with Mrs. Hilary in the arbour.  She told him about Dr. Evans and the other psycho-analyst doctor at St. Mary’s Bay.  He frowned over Dr. Evans, who lived in the same street as he did.