ld read and
discuss Freud, whom Neville, unfairly prejudiced, found both an obscene
maniac and a liar. They might laugh with her at Freud when he expanded on
that complex, whichever it is, by which mothers and daughters hate each
other, and fathers and sons--but they both all the same took seriously
things which seemed to Neville merely loathsome imbecilities. Gerda and
Kay didn't, in point of fact, find so many things either funny or
disgusting as Neville did; throwing her mind back twenty years, Neville
tried to remember whether she had found the world as funny and as
frightful when she was a medical student as she did now; on the whole she
thought not. Boys and girls are, for all their high spirits, creatures of
infinite solemnities and pomposities. They laugh; but the twinkling
irony, mocking at itself and everything else, of the thirties and
forties, they have not yet learnt. They cannot be gentle cynics; they
are so full of faith and hope, and when these are hurt they turn savage.
About Kay and Gerda there was a certain splendid earnestness with regard
to life. Admirable creatures, thought Neville, watching them with
whimsical tenderness. They had nothing to do with the pre-war, dilettante
past, the sophisticated gaiety of the young century. Their childhood had
been lived during the great war, and they had emerged from it hot with
elemental things, discussing life, lust, love, politics and social
reform, with cool candour, intelligent thoroughness and Elizabethan
directness. They wouldn't mind having passions and giving them rein; they
wouldn't think it vulgar, or even tedious, to lead loose lives. Probably,
in fact, it wasn't; probably it was Neville, and the people who had grown
up with her, who were overcivilized, too far from the crude stuff of
life, the monotonies and emotionalisms of Nature. And now Nature was
taking her rather startling revenge on the next generation.

3

Neville ran upstairs, and came down to breakfast dressed in blue cotton,
with her damp hair smoothly taken back from her broad forehead that
jutted broodingly over her short pointed face. She had the look of
a dryad at odds with the world, a whimsical and elfish intellectual.

Rodney and Kay and Gerda had been putting parcels at her place, and a
pile of letters lay among them. There is, anyhow, that about birthdays,
however old they make you. Kay had given her a splendid great
pocket-knife and a book he wanted to read, Gerda an oak box