Sylvia wanted rather to talk again about spiritualism in order to find out if Mère Gontran's speculations coincided at any point with her own; but a discussion of spiritual experience with her was like a discussion of the liver; she was almost grossly insistent upon the organic machinery, almost brutal in her zest for the practical, one might almost say the technical details. The mysteries of human conduct on earth left her utterly uninterested except when she could obtain a commentary upon them from the spirits for a practical purpose; the spirits took the place for her of the solicitor and the doctor rather than of the priest. Systems of philosophy and religion had no meaning for Mère Gontran; her spiritual advice never concerned itself with them; and the ultimate intention of immortality was as well concealed from her as the justification of life on earth. It was this very absence of the highfalutin which impressed Sylvia with the genuineness of the manifestations that she procured, but which at the time discouraged her with the sense that death merely substituted one irrational form of being for another. "What's it all for?" Sylvia had once asked. "For?" Mère Gontran had repeated in perplexity: she had never considered the utility of this question hitherto. "Yes, why, for instance, did you marry Gontran? Did you love him? Are your children destined to fulfil any part in the world? And _their_ children after them?" "Why do you want to worry your head with such questions?" Mère Gontran had asked, compassionately. "But you deny me the consolation of oblivion. You accept this endless existence after death with its apparently meaningless prolongation of human vapidity and pettiness, and you're surprised that I resent it." But it was impossible to carry on the discussion with somebody who was as contented with what is as an animal and whose only prayer was _Give us this day our daily bread_. It was a disappointing contribution to the problem of life from one who had spent so long on the borderland of the grave. Yet it was Mère Gontran's devotion to this aspiration that had made her lodge Sylvia all these weeks. "How can you, who are so kind, want to see your sons go to the war, not for any motives of honor or patriotism, but apparently just to keep them away from cigarettes and idleness? What does their nationality really matter?" "They must do something for themselves," Mère Gontran replied. "Just at the moment the war offers a good opening." "But suppose they are killed?" "I hope they will be. I shall be on much better terms with them then than I am now. Gontran talks to me in English nowadays; so would they, and we might get to know one another. Cats don't worry about their kittens, after they're grown up; in fact, they're anxious to get rid of them. And kingfishers chase their young ones away, or so I was informed by an English ventriloquist who was interested in natural history."