"Then I don't want to believe in it." Cora's manner was decisive and professional as such manners are depicted by actresses. "As a matter of fact," she summed up, "the more I think, and the more I read, the less I'm inclined to accept a life beyond the grave as a possibility. Such books"--again she indicated that in her father's hand--"express a natural human yearning, as do also the myths of the New Testament, but--" She left her sentence there. The father, too, left it there, as if at heart he agreed with her. "I wonder where mother is," Lester asked himself, and immediately was in her room upstairs. She was seated before a mirror, trying on a hat. Another hat was on a chair beside her. Two bandboxes with a disarray of silver paper stood beside her on the floor. Ethelind, short-skirted, and moving with nimble, sylphlike feet, was standing back to get the effect. "I think I like that one the better of the two," she was saying, "and yet I don't know but--" "Oh, they're awful, both of them," the mother complained. "It's funny I can never get a hat that suits me but the same old thing." Lester went forward. He meant that she should see him first in the mirror. The reflection would startle her, of course, but he should be able to reassure her. It was he who was startled first, since, standing before the mirror, he didn't get his own reflection. He felt so solid, so warm, so full of energy, that it seemed to him impossible that a reflection should not be cast. But there was nothing--nothing but the image of his mother casting her bright eyes up at the cockatoo crest on a hat that suggested a Mephistopheles. "Mother, I want to talk to you about Molly." "Oh, dear, what an old hag I'm beginning to look!" "Oh no, you're not, mother dear," Ethelind returned, cheerfully. "That's just worry. One of these days the war will be over and he'll be coming back a great general--" "What's the use of the war being over and his coming back a great general, when that creature will have the first say in him?" Ethelind came behind her mother, to give the hat a twitch to a more effective angle. "Mother dear, I don't believe he'd like to have you talk in that way." Lester appealed to his sister. "Ethelind, I want you to help me. I want you all to think of Molly. I'm not coming home; but I'm well and happy. That is, I could be happy if I only knew that she was being taken care of and that you were good to her." But Ethelind only twitched the hat again, and the subject dropped. As it did a curtain seemed to come down on the scenes that had meant home to him, once more suggesting the action of a play. There followed for Lester a further phase of unfolding thought, though with no solution of some of his perplexities.