ioned. 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."

"