"For?" Mère Gontran had repeated in perplexity: she had never considered the utility of this question hitherto.
"Yes, why, for instance, did you marry Gontran? Did you love him? Are your children destined to fulfil any part in the world? And their children after them?"
"Why do you want to worry your head with such questions?" Mère Gontran had asked, compassionately.
"But you deny me the consolation of oblivion. You accept this endless existence after death with its apparently meaningless prolongation of human vapidity and pettiness, and you're surprised that I resent it."
But it was impossible to carry on the discussion with somebody who was as contented with what is as an animal and whose only prayer was Give us this day our daily bread. It was a disappointing contribution to the problem of life from one who had spent so long on the borderland of the grave. Yet it was Mère Gontran's devotion to this aspiration that had made her lodge Sylvia all these weeks.
"How can you, who are so kind, want to see your sons go to the war, not for any motives of honor or patriotism, but apparently just to keep them away from cigarettes and idleness? What does their nationality really matter?"
"They must do something for themselves," Mère Gontran replied. "Just at the moment the war offers a good opening."
"But suppose they are killed?"
"I hope they will be. I shall be on much better terms with them then than I am now. Gontran talks to me in English nowadays; so would they, and we might get to know one another. Cats don't worry about their kittens, after they're grown up; in fact, they're anxious to get rid of them. And kingfishers chase their young ones away, or so I was informed by an English ventriloquist who was interested in natural history."
"Well, I always congratulated myself on being free from sentimentality," Sylvia said. "But beside you I'm like a keepsake-album."