Then after a long pause he asked another question. It was really a question he was always asking in one form or another, only he had never yet put it so directly perhaps. He whispered it from a grave and solemn heart: ‘Are you nearer to—God, do you think?’ It was a word he rarely used. In his conversations with the child on earth he had never once used it. She waited a long time before replying. Instinctively, very subtly, it came to him that she did not know exactly what he meant. ‘I’m _in_ and _with_ Everything there is—Everywhere,’ she said softly. ‘And I couldn’t possibly be nearer to anything than I am.’ More than that she could not explain, and Paul never asked similar questions again. He understood that they were really unanswerable. And it was the same with other thoughts, thoughts referring to the fundamental conditions of temporal existence, that is. Nothing, for instance, made time and space seem less real than the way she answered questions involving one or other. Out of curiosity he had gone to the trouble of reading up other records of spirit communion—the literature (saving the mark) of Spiritualism brims over with them—and he had asked her some question with regard to the detailed geography there given. ‘But there’s no _place_ at all where I am,’ the child laughed. ‘I am just _here_. There was no place really in our Aventures, was there? Place is only with you on earth!’ And another time, talking of the ‘future’ when he should come to join herself and Dick at the close of his earthly pilgrimage, she said between bursts of the merriest laughter he had ever known: ‘But that’s now! already! You come; you join us; we _are_ all together—always!’ And when he insisted that he could not possibly be in two places at once, and reminded her that she had already told him she was ‘waiting’ for his arrival, the only reply he could get was this jolly laughter, and the assurance that he was ‘awfully muddled and c’fused’ and would ‘never understand it _that_ way!’ The main thing these ‘silent’ conversations taught him seemed to be that Death brings no revolutionary change as regards character; the soul does not leap into a state much better or much worse than it knew before; the opportunities for discipline and development continue gradually just as they did in the body, only under different conditions; and there is no abrupt change into perfection on the one hand, or into desolation on the other. He gathered, too, that these ‘conditions’ depended very largely upon the kind of life—especially the kind of thought—that the personality had indulged on earth. The things that Nixie ‘imagined’ and yearned for, she found.