A friend of hers, who had lost her son at Arras, had tried hard to persuade her to go to a woman she knew of in Maida Vale. Not séances, just you and she together, and the room wasn’t even darkened. This woman had worked in a shop. She was quite uneducated. Her control was a Red Indian. Lily’s friend said how weird it was to hear her, when she was in a trance, bellowing in a deep man’s voice and shouting with laughter. She was very small and fragile. It seemed that the Red Indian had told Lily’s friend that her son was happy and waiting for her to come to him. The poor mother had been so much cheered. It was pathetic. But Lily couldn’t believe. No, not in the Red Indian, at any rate. It seemed that there were some things we weren’t meant to know. One reads books like the Gospel of the Hereafter and everything seems so certain and beautiful and comforting. And then you try to go one step further, and there is only mockery and blackness.

Yet the temptation was very strong and it was always present. Suppose one went to that woman and did get a message—just a few words, anything, so long as you could believe it was real. Suppose some woman held your hands and began speaking to you in your husband’s voice. In Richard’s voice. It would be ghastly, wonderful. One might walk out of that room and never feel unhappy again. Or perhaps, Lily thought, I should go straight home and drink something to send me to sleep. Then we could be together again at once.

Some time ago another friend had impressed Lily very deeply by describing how she had seen her dead husband standing, quite plainly, at the top of the staircase in her own house. Lily’s friend had had no doubt whatever that it was really he, that he had come to console her, to show her that he was still alive in another world.