"Or it may be an A. Never mind. It always begins rather doubtfully. I won't lose my temper with it to-night."
The planchette might have been a tenderly loved child learning to write for the first time, by the way Mère Gontran encouraged it and tried to award a shape and purpose to its most amorphous tracks. When it had covered the sheet of paper with an impossibly complicated river-system, Mère Gontran fetched a clean sheet and told Sylvia severely that she must try not to urge the planchette. Any attempt at urging had a very bad effect on its willingness.
"I didn't think I was urging it," said Sylvia, humbly.
"Try and sit more still, dear. If you like, I'll put my feet on your toes and then you won't be so tempted to jig. We may have to sit all night, if we aren't careful."
Sylvia strained every nerve to sit as still as possible in order to avoid having her toes imprisoned all night by Mère Gontran's feet, which were particularly large, even for so tall a woman. She concentrated upon preventing her hands from leading planchette to trace the course of any more rivers toward the sea of baize, and after sitting for twenty minutes like this she felt that all the rest of her body had gone into her hands. She had never thought that her hands were small, but she had certainly never realized that they were as large and as ugly as they were; as for Mère Gontran's, they had for some time lost any likeness to hands and lay upon the planchette like two uncooked chops. At last when Sylvia had reached the state of feeling like a large pincushion that was being rapidly pricked by thousands of pins, Mère Gontran murmured:
"It's going to start."
Immediately afterward the planchette careered across the paper and wrote a sentence.
"Dick's picked a daisy," Mère Gontran read out. "Drat the thing! Never mind, we'll have one more try."
Again a sentence was written, and again it repeated that Dick had picked a daisy.
Suddenly Samuel the collie made an odd noise.