3

Though heaviness endured for the night, joy came in the morning, as is
apt to happen where there is sea air. Mrs. Hilary on her birthday had
a revulsion to gaiety, owing to a fine day, her unstable temperament,
letters, presents and being made a fuss of. Also Grandmama said, when
she went up to see her after breakfast, "This new dress suits you
particularly, my dear child. It brings out the colour in your eyes," and
everyone likes to hear that when they are sixty-three or any other age.

So, when the rest of her children arrived, Mrs. Hilary was ready for
them.

They embraced her in turn; Pamela, capable, humorous and intelligent,
the very type of the professional woman at her best, but all the time
preferring Frances Carr, anxious about her because she was overworking
and run down; Nan, her extravagant present in her hands, on fire to
protect her mother against old age, depression and Rosalind, yet knowing
too how soon she herself would be smouldering with irritation; Gilbert,
spare and cynical, writer of plays and literary editor of the Weekly
Critic, and with him his wife Rosalind, whom Mrs. Hilary had long since
judged as a voluptuous rake who led men on and made up unseemly stories
and her lovely face, but who insisted on coming to The Gulls with Gilbert
to see his adorable mother. Rosalind, who was always taking up
things--art, or religion, or spiritualism, or young men--and dropping
them when they bored her, had lately taken up psycho-analysis. She was
studying what she called her mother-in-law's "case," looking for and
finding complexes in her past which should account for her somewhat
unbalanced present.