Sylvia visited the _pension_, which was a tumble-down house in a very large garden of the rankest vegetation, a queer embrangled place; but the first impression of the guests appealed to her, and she moved into it the same afternoon. Mère Gontran, the owner, was one of those expatriated women that lose their own nationality and acquire instead a new nationality compounded of their own, their husband's, and the country they inhabit. She was about fifty-five years old, nearly six feet in height, excessively lean, with a neck like a turkey's, a weather-beaten veinous complexion, very square shoulders, and thin, colorless hair done up in a kind of starfish at the back. Her eyes were very bright, of an intense blue, and she had a habit of wearing odd stockings, which, like her hair, were always coming down, chiefly because she used her garters to keep her sleeves above her elbows. One of the twin passions of her life was animals; but she also had three sons, loutish young men who ate or smoked cigarettes all day and could hardly speak a word of English or French. Their mother, on the contrary, though she had come to Petersburg as a governess thirty-five years ago, and had lived there ever since, could speak hardly any Russian and only very bad French. Mère Gontran's animals were really more accomplished linguists than she, if it was true, as she asserted, that a collie she possessed could say "good-by," "adieu," and "proschai." Sylvia suggested that the Russian salute had really been a sneeze, but Mère Gontran defied her to explain away the English or the French, and was angry at any doubts being cast on what she had heard with her own ears. In addition to Samuel, the talking collie, there was a senile bulldog called James, who on a pillow of his own slept beside Mère Gontran in her bed, which was in a hut two hundred yards away from the house, at the other end of the garden. High up round the walls were hung boxes for nine cats; into these they ascended by ladders, and none of them ever attempted to sleep anywhere but in his own box, an example to the rest of the _pension_. There were numerous other animals about the place, the most conspicuous of which were a pony and a goat that spent most of their time in the kitchen with the only servant, a stunted Tartar who went muttering about the house and slept in a cupboard under the stairs. Mère Gontran's other great passion was spiritualism; but Sylvia did not have much opportunity to test her truthfulness in this direction, because at first she was more interested in the guests at the _pension_, accepting Mère Gontran as one accepts a queer fact for future investigation at the right moment.