Sylvia was conscious of trying to arrive at an explanation of Mère Gontran that, while it allowed her behavior a certain amount of reasonableness, would prevent herself from accepting Mère Gontran's own explanation of it. There was something distasteful, something cheap and vulgar, in the conception of Gontran's spiritual existence as an infinite prolongation of his life upon earth; there was something radically fatuous in the imagination of him at the end of a ghostly telephone-wire still at the beck and call of human curiosity. If, indeed, in some mysterious way the essential Gontran was communicating with his wife, the translation of his will to communicate must be a subjective creation of hers; it was somehow ludicrous, and even unpleasant, to accept Dick's gathering of a daisy as a demonstration of the activity of mankind in another world; it was too much a finite conception altogether. Without hesitation Sylvia rejected spiritualism as a useful adventure for human intelligence. It was impossible to accept its more elaborate manifestations with bells and tambourines and materializing mediums, when one knew the universal instinct of mankind to lie; and in its simpler manifestations, as with Mère Gontran, where conscious or deliberate deceit was out of the question, it was merely a waste of time, being bound by the limitations of an individual soul that would always be abnormal and probably in most cases idiotic. Sylvia pulled down the blind, and, leaving Mère Gontran to her nocturnal contemplation, went to bed. Notwithstanding her abrupt rejection of spiritualism, Sylvia found, when she was in bed, that the incidents of the evening and the accessories of the house were affecting her to sleeplessness. That succession of raps declined to come within the natural explanation that she had attempted. Were they due to some action of overcharged atmosphere, a kind of miniature thunderclap from the meeting of two so-called electrical currents generated by herself and Mère Gontran? Were they merely coincidental creakings of furniture in response to the warmth of the stove? Or had Mère Gontran mesmerized her into hearing raps that were never made? The cats had also heard them; but Mère Gontran's intimacy with her animals might well have established such a mental domination, even over them.