y interviews, because that
was so easy to start off with.

"You have something on your mind," said the doctor. "You suffer from
depression."

"Yes, I know that. I was coming to that. That is what you must cure for
me."

"You must think back.... What is the earliest thing you can remember?
Perhaps your baptism? Possibly even your first bath? It has been
done...."

"You may be right. I remember some early baths. One of them may have been
the first of all, who knows? What of it, doctor?"

But the doctor, in her imaginings, would at this point only make notes in
a big book and keep silence, as if he had thought as much. Perhaps, no
more than she, he did not know what of it.

Mrs. Hilary could hear herself protesting.

"I am _not_ unhappy because of my baptism, which, so far as I know, went
off without a hitch. I am _not_ troubled by my first bath, nor by any
later bath. Indeed, indeed you must believe me, it is not that at all."

"The more they protest," the psycho-analyst would murmur, "the more it is
so." For that was what Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung always said, so that there
was no escape from their aspersions.

"Why do _you_ think you are so often unhappy?" he would ask her, to
draw her out and she would reply, "Because my life is over. Because I
am an old discarded woman, thrown away onto the dust-heap like a broken
egg-shell. Because my husband is gone and my children are gone, and they
do not love me as I love them. Because I have only my mother to live
with, and she is calm and cares for nothing but only waits for the end.
Because I have nothing to do from morning till night. Because I am
sixty-three, and that is too old and too young. Because life is empty
and disappointing, and I am tired, and drift like seaweed tossed to and
fro by the waves."

It sounded indeed enough, and tears would fill her eyes as she said it.
The psycho-analyst would listen, passive and sceptical but intelligent.

"Not one of your reasons is the correct one. But I will find the true
reason for you and expose it, and after that it will trouble you no more.
Now you shall relate to me the whole history of your life."

What a comfortable moment! Mrs. Hilary, when she came to it in her
imagined interview, would draw a deep breath and settle down and begin.
The story of her life! How absorbing a thing to relate to someone who
really wanted to hear it! How far better than the confessional--for
priests, besides requiring only those porti