“Rosalind sent you to him; of course; she would.  Why didn’t you ask me, mother?  He’s a desperate Freudian, you know, and they’re not nearly so good as the others.  Besides, this particular man is a shoddy scoundrel, I believe....  Was he offensive?”

“I wouldn’t let him be, Jim.  I was prepared for that.  I ...  I changed the conversation.”

Jim laughed, and did his favourite trick with her hand, straightening the thin fingers one by one as they lay across his sensitive palm.  How happy it always made her!

“Well,” he said, “I daresay this man down at the Bay is all right.  I’ll find out if he’s any good or not....  They talk a lot of tosh, you know, mother; you’ll have to sift the grain from the chaff.”

But he saw that her eyes were interested, her face more alert than usual, her very poise more alive.  She had found a new interest in life, like keeping a parrot, or learning bridge, or getting religion.  It was what they had always tried to find for her in vain.

“So long,” he said, “as you don’t believe more than half what they tell you....  Let me know how it goes on, won’t you, and what this man is like.  If I don’t approve I shall come and stop it.”

She loved that from Jim.

“Of course, dearest.  Of course I shall tell you about it.  And I know one must be careful.”

It was something to have become an object for care; it put one more in the foreground.  She would have gone on willingly with the subject, but Jim changed her abruptly for Neville.

“Neville’s looking done up.”

She felt the little sharp pang which Neville’s name on Jim’s lips had always given her.  His very pronunciation of it hurt her—­“Nivvle,” he said it, as if he had been an Irishman.  It brought all the past back; those two dear ones talking together, studying together, going off together, bound by a hundred common interests, telling each other things they never told her.

“Yes.  It’s this ridiculous work of hers.  It’s so absurd:  a married woman of her age making her head ache working for examinations.”

In old days Jim and Neville had worked together.  Jim had been proud of Neville’s success; she had been quicker than he.  Mrs. Hilary, who had welcomed Neville’s marriage as ending all that, foresaw a renewal of the hurtful business.

But Jim looked grave and disapproving over it.

“It is absurd,” he agreed, and her heart rose.  “And of course she can’t do it, can’t make up all that leeway.  Besides, her brain has lost its grip.  She’s not kept it sharpened; she’s spent her life on people.  You can’t have it both ways—­a woman can’t, I mean.  Her work’s been different.  She doesn’t seem to realise that what she’s trying to learn up again now, in the spare moments of an already full life, demands a whole lifetime of hard work.  She can’t get back those twenty years; no one could.  And she can’t get back the clear, gripping brain she had before she had children.  She’s given some of it to them.  That’s nature’s way, unfortunately.  Hard luck, no doubt, but there it is; you can’t get round it.  Nature’s a hybrid of fool and devil.”