"but it's very terrible, and I would rather not
dwell on it."

So he would let her dwell instead on the early days of her married life,
or on the children's childhood, or on her love for Neville and Jim, or on
her impatience with her mother.

2

They were happy little times, stimulating, cosy little times. They spoke
straight to the heart, easing it of its weight of tragedy. A splendid
man, Mr. Cradock, with his shrewd, penetrating sympathy, his kind
firmness. He would listen with interest to everything; the sharp words
she had had with Grandmama, troubles with the maids, the little rubs
of daily life (and what a rubbing business life is, to be sure!) as
well as to profounder, more tragic accounts of desolation, jealousy,
weariness and despair. He would say "Your case is a very usual one,"
so that she did not feel ashamed of being like that. He reduced it all,
dispassionately and yet not unsympathetically, and with clear scientific
precision, to terms of psychical and physical laws. He trained his
patient to use her mind and her will, as well as to remember her dreams
and to be shocked at nothing that they signified.

Mrs. Hilary would wake each morning, or during the night, and clutch at
the dream which was flying from her, clutch and secure it, and make it
stand and deliver its outlines to her. She was content with outlines; it
was for Mr. Cradock to supply the interpretation. Sometimes, if Mrs.
Hilary couldn't remember any dreams, he would supply, according to a
classic precedent, the dream as well as the interpretation. But on the
whole, deeply as she revered and admired him, Mrs. Hilary preferred to
remember her own dreams; what they meant was bad enough, but the meaning
of the dreams that Mr. Cradock told her she had dreamt was beyond all
words.... That terrible Unconscious! Mrs. Hilary disliked it excessively;
she felt rather as if it were a sewer, sunk beneath an inadequate
grating.

But from Mr. Cradock she put up with hearing about it. She would have put
up with anything. He was so steadying and so wonderful. He enabled her to
face life with a new poise, a fresh lease of strength and vitality. She
told Grandmama so. Grandmama said "Yes, my dear, I've observed it in you.
It sounds to me an unpleasing business, but it is obviously doing you
good, so far. I only wish it may last. The danger may be reaction, after
you have finished the course and lost touch with this young man." (Mr.
Cradock was forty-five