Mrs. Hilary was flushed. Hope and shame tingled in her together.
“I shan’t want to keep anything dark. I’ve no reason.”
Rosalind’s mocking eyes said “That’s what they all say.” Her lips said “The foreconscious self always has its reasons for hiding up the things the unconscious self knows and feels.”
“Oh, all that stuff. …” Mrs. Hilary was sick of it, having read too much about it in The Breath of Life. “I hope this Dr. Evans will talk to me in plain English, not in that affected jargon.”
“He’ll use language suited to you, I suppose,” said Rosalind, “as far as he can. But these things can’t always be put so that just anyone can grasp them. They’re too complicated. You should read it up beforehand, and try if you can understand it a little.”
Rosalind, who had no brains herself, insulting Mrs. Hilary’s, was rather more than Mrs. Hilary could bear. Rosalind she knew for a fool, so far as intellectual matters went, for Nan had said so. Clever enough at clothes, and talking scandal, and winning money at games, and skating over thin ice without going through—but when it came to a book, or an idea, or a political question, Rosalind was no whit more intelligent than she was, in fact much less. She was a rotten psychoanalyst, all her in-laws were sure.
Mrs. Hilary said, “I’ve been reading a good deal about it lately. It doesn’t seem to me very difficult, though exceedingly foolish in parts.”
Rosalind was touchy about psychoanalysis; she always got angry if people said it was foolish in any way. She was like that; she could see no weak points in anything she took up; it came from being vain, and not having a brain. She said one of the things angry people say, instead of discussing the subject rationally.
“I don’t suppose the amount of it you’ve been able to read would seem difficult. If you came to anything difficult you’d probably stop, you see. Anyhow, if it seems to you so foolish why do you want to be analysed?”
“Oh, one may as well try things. I’ve no doubt there’s something in it besides the nonsense.”
Mrs. Hilary spoke jauntily, with hungry, unquiet, seeking eyes that would not meet Rosalind’s. She was afraid that Rosalind would find out that she wanted to be cured of being miserable, of being jealous, of having inordinate passions about so little. Rosalind, in some ways a great stupid cow, was uncannily clever when it came to being spiteful and knowing about you the things you didn’t want known. It must be horrible to be psychoanalysed by Rosalind, who had no pity and no reticence. The things about you would not only be known but spread abroad among all those whom Rosalind met. A vile, dreadful tongue.
“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 makeup.
“Rosalind,” said Mrs. Hilary, knowing that it would be less than useless to ask Rosalind to keep her secret, “has been recommending me a psychoanalyst 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
