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She had not liked the reproof of her ‘cosy,’ for which Monica could not but feel grateful, though Mr. Gales’s encomiums struck her as singularly impudent.

Hester sat opposite her, on a straight chair and was evidently bent on doing her duty by her. ‘I’m rather worried about Robin, Monica. He calls out in his sleep. There’s some repression, I think, and he cries when I try to get at it. He says he sees Jeremy in a cage.—I suppose that’s the goldfish.—You had the same sort of trouble with Vivian, hadn’t you, Marcia?’

‘There was a definite complex in Vivian’s case,’ Mrs. Jessup, from the easy chair where she already sat smoking, a magazine on her lap, answered. ‘He’s always tended to Narcissism; moral scruples and general priggishness when he was little and trying to get religion now at school. He wants to be like Saint Francis, it seems, and say his prayers. He may outgrow it, but it’s rather disturbing I own.’ Mrs. Jessup did not lift her eyes from her magazine as she thus diagnosed her child. ‘Have you seen these pictures of Malcolm’s, Beppo? Putrid the way he panders to the public nowadays.’

Mr. Gales sat on the arm of her chair to look while Mrs. Travers, exclaiming that she was