‘Of course not! How can I change? I’m always Nixie, wherever I am!’
‘But you feel different——?’ he insisted.
‘I feel better,’ she answered, still laughing. ‘I feel awfully jolly.’
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!’