own again. She wasn't sleepy, and hated writing letters. She wanted
someone to talk to, and there was no one, unless she rang for the
housemaid. Oh, this dreadful ennui.... Did anyone in the world know it
but her? The others all seemed busy and bright. That was because they
were young. And Grandmama seemed serene and bright. That was because she
was old, close to the edge of life, and sat looking over the gulf into
space, not caring. But for Mrs. Hilary there was ennui, and the dim,
empty room in the cold grey July afternoon. The empty stage; no audience,
no actors. Only a lonely, disillusioned actress trailing about it, hungry
for the past.... A book Gerda had been reading lay on the table. "The
Breath of Life," it was called, which was surely just what Mrs. Hilary
wanted. She picked it up, opened it, turned the pages, then, tucking it
away out of sight under her arm, left the room and went upstairs.

"Many wonderful cures," Neville had said. And had mentioned depression
as one of the diseases cured. What, after all, if there was something in
this stuff which she had never tried to understand, had always dismissed,
according to her habit, with a single label? "Labels don't help. Labels
get you nowhere." How often the children had told her that, finding her
terse terminology that of a shallow mind, endowed with inadequate
machinery for acquiring and retaining knowledge, as indeed it was.

8

Gerda, going up to Mrs. Hilary's room to tell her about tea, found her
asleep on the sofa, with "The Breath of Life" fallen open from her hand.
A smile flickered on Gerda's delicate mouth, for she had heard her
grandmother on the subject of psycho-analysis, and here she was, having
taken to herself the book which Gerda was reading for her Freud circle.
Gerda read a paragraph on the open page.

"It will often be found that what we believe to be unhappiness is really,
in the secret and unconscious self, a joy, which the familiar process of
inversion sends up into our consciousness in the form of grief. If, for
instance, a mother bewails the illness of her child, it is because her
unconscious self is experiencing the pleasure of importance, of being
condoled and sympathised with, as also that of having her child (if it is
a male) entirely for the time dependent on her ministrations. If, on the
other hand, the sick child is her daughter, her grief is in reality a
hope that this, her young rival, may die, and leave her supreme in the