“Have you no friends here?” I inquired. “I must have many acquaintances,” she said; “but I never cared for intimate friendships. I used to entertain a good deal; my husband’s political position demanded it.” “Perhaps there is someone on this side to whom you were specially kind at some time or other, someone whose grief you helped to bear, whose poverty you eased.” “I patronised our organised charities.” “I fear that sort of help is too impersonal to be remembered here. Have you no children?” “No.” “No brothers or sisters on this side?” “I quarrelled with my only brother for marrying beneath him.” “But surely,” I said, “you must have had a mother. Was she not waiting for you when you came over?” “No.” This surprised me, for I had been told that all mother spirits who have not gone back to the world know by a peculiar thrill when a child to which they have given birth is about to be reborn into the spiritual world--a sort of sympathetic after-pain, the final and sweetest reward of motherhood. “Then she must have reincarnated,” I said. “Do you hold to that pagan belief?” the lady inquired, with just a touch of superiority. “I thought that only queer people, Theosophists and such, believed in reincarnation.” “I was always queer,” I admitted. “But you know, of course, dear madam, that about three-quarters of the earth’s inhabitants are familiar with that theory in some form or other.” We continued our talk for a little time, and meanwhile I was puzzling my heart as to what I could do to help this poor lonely woman, for whom no one was waiting. I passed in mental review this and that ministering angel of my acquaintance, and wondered which of them would be considered most correct from the conventional earthly point of view. The noblest of them was usually at the side of some newly arrived unfortunate woman--to use a euphemism of that polite society which my latest _protégée_ had frequented. The others were here, there, and everywhere, but generally with those souls who needed them most; while the need of my present companion was more real than urgent. If Lionel had been here, he might have entertained her for a while. I wished that I had cultivated the acquaintance of some of those ladies who crochet and gossip in this world as they crocheted and gossiped in yours. Do not be shocked. Did you fancy that a lifelong habit could be laid aside in a moment? As women on earth dream often of their knitting, so they do here. It is as easy to knit in this world as it is to dream in yours. Understand that the world in which I now live is no more essentially sacred than is the world in which you live, nor is it any more mysterious to those who dwell in it. To the serious soul all conditions are sacred--except those that are profane, and both are found out here as well as on the earth.