"Now when this happened I'd never seen my husband. He was working at the Embassy even in those days, and never went to Finland in his life. The next day the family was called back to Petersburg on account of the death of the grandmother, and I met Gontran at some friends'! We were married about six months afterward.
"So there again, if I could see Gontran when he was alive before I'd ever met him, you don't suppose I'm not going to believe that I've seen him any number of times since he was dead? Until quite recently when he reached this new plane, we talked together as comfortably as when he was still alive and sitting in that chair."
"It's only since he's met this Dick that the communications are so unsatisfactory. Why, of course I know what's happened," cried Mère Gontran, in a rapture of discovery. "Why didn't I think of it sooner? It's the war!"
"Aren't there thousands of spirits being set free every day? Just as all the communications on earth have broken down, in the same way they must have broken down with the spirits. Fancy my not having understood that before! Well, aren't I dense?"
Five raps of surpassing loudness signaled upon the air.
"Gontran's delighted," she exclaimed. "He was always delighted when I found out something for myself."
Soon after this Mère Gontran, having gathered up from the crowded table a variety of implements that could not possibly serve any purpose that night, wandered out into the garden, followed by Samuel and the five cats; Sylvia thought of her haunted passage through the dark autumnal growth of leaves toward that strange room she occupied, and went up-stairs to bed rather tremulously. Yet on the whole she was glad that Mère Gontran left her like this every night at the _pension_ with the Tartar servant in her cupboard under the stairs, and with the three ungainly sons, who used to sleep in a barrack at the end of the long passage on the ground floor. Sylvia had peeped into this room when the young men were out and had been surprised by its want of resemblance to a sleeping-chamber. There were, to be sure, three beds, but they had the appearance of beds that had been long stowed away in a remote part of a warehouse for disused furniture: the whole room was like that, with nothing human appertaining to it save the smell of stale tobacco-smoke. Yet, really, now that the migratory guests had gone on their way, it would have been even more surprising to find in the _pension_ signs of humanity, so much had its permanent inhabitants, both animals and human beings, approximated to one another. The animals were a little more like human beings; the human beings were a little more like animals: the margin between men and animals was narrow enough in the most distinguishing circumstances, and at the _pension_ these circumstances were lacking.