But of more intimate and poignant interest to Bertram was Janet’s frank talk about his private disaster—the failure of his marriage. She had asked blunt questions about his relations with Joyce, amazingly indiscreet and fearless questions, and after fencing with them awhile, he had told her the truth of things, with reticence and reservations, and a sense of loyalty to Joyce, so that he put down most of the cause of failure to his own stupidity and lack of patience.
Janet listened, cross-examined, probed his mental wound, with the skill and ruthlessness of a psychoanalyst.
“Very interesting!” she remarked, more than once, like a doctor diagnosing a difficult case.
“The inevitable clash of opposed temperaments,” was another remark of hers, delivered with an air of superior wisdom, and an amusement which she did not try to conceal.
“You’re not very sympathetic!” complained Bertram. “Not very helpful. What’s my way out of this mess?”
Janet said, “Forget it. Shove it away into your subconsciousness, and go on as though it didn’t exist. You’ll find that it all straightens out.”
She gave him the benefit of her diagnosis.
“It’s a case of sex-repression on your side, and of fear-complex on your wife’s side. Yours is a simple case. Perfectly ordinary. Nothing to worry about. Your wife’s case is more complicated.”
In response to Bertram’s plea for enlightenment, and his heated protest that he was worrying, most damnably, Janet elaborated a thesis regarding Joyce.
Bertram’s wife, she said, was the victim of an early environment which had caused abnormality. She’d been sheltered since babyhood from all contact with the realities of life. She was never allowed to speak with “common people” on equal terms. They’d pulled their forelocks to “the little lady” when she had passed in her perambulator. They’d curtsied at the lodge gates every time she went in and out. She was made to believe that she was superior to the rest of the world, with the exception of other people like herself, who lived in other houses like Holme Ottery.