loves, and
passes on, and loves again. One's heart cracks and mends; one cracks the
hearts of others, and these mend too. That is--_inter alia_--what life is
for. If one day you want the tale of my life, Barry, you shall have it;
though that's not what life is for, to make a tale about. So thrilling in
the living, so flat and stale in the telling--oh let's get on and live
some more of it, lots and lots more, and let the dead past bury its dead.

Between a laugh and a sleepy yawn, Nan jumped from the bus at the corner
of Oakley Street.

CHAPTER V

SEAWEED

1

"Complexes," read Mrs. Hilary, "are of all sorts and sizes." And
there was a picture of four of them in a row, looking like netted cherry
trees whose nets have got entangled with each other. So that was what
they were like. Mrs. Hilary had previously thought of them as being more
of the nature of noxious insects, or fibrous growths with infinite
ramifications. Slim young trees. Not so bad, then, after all.

"A complex is characterised, and its elements are bound together by
a specific emotional tone, experienced as feeling when the complex
is aroused. Apart from the mental processes and corresponding actions
depending on purely rational mental systems, it is through complexes that
the typical mental process (the specific response) works, the particular
complex representing the particular set of mental elements involved in
the process which begins with perception and cognition and ends with the
corresponding conation."

Mrs. Hilary read it three times, and the third time she understood it,
if possible, less than the first. Complexes seemed very difficult
things, and she had never been clever. Any of her children, or even her
grandchildren, would understand it all in a moment. If you have such
things--and everyone has, she had learnt--you ought to be able to
understand them. Yet why? You didn't understand your bodily internal
growths; you left them to your doctor. There were doctors who explained
your complexes to you.... What a revolting idea! It would surely make
them worse, not better. (Mrs. Hilary still vaguely regarded these growths
as something of the nature of cancer.)

Sometimes she imagined herself a patient, interviewing one of these odd
doctors. A man doctor, not a woman; she didn't trust woman doctors of any
kind; she had always been thankful that Neville had given it up and
married instead.

"Insomnia," she would say, in these imaginar