"Pierrette, would you like to be married?"
The little cat put out her claws with the air of an affronted virgin.
"Wouldn't you like to have a nice husband to play with when I'm too busy to play with you? Wouldn't you like to have dear little snow-white kittens? Because your kittens would be snow-white when they were born, you know. Would you be a good mother?"
Notwithstanding Pierrette's lack of interest in the suggestion, Mary was much taken up by the notion of obtaining a mate for her. It came to seem of the utmost importance that Pierrette should hand on her charm to kittens like herself. The search for a Siamese male as well-bred, as beautiful, and as intelligent as herself occupied Mary's time more successfully than spiritualism. It happened that the crystal-gazer recommended by Madame de Sarlovèze was, at any rate so far as Mary's séance was concerned, a complete failure and unable to perceive anything except various indeterminate shapes which she most dubiously likened to pigeons. When nobody present could muster up the faintest interest in pigeons, the charlatan (thus already Mary characterized her entertainer) suggested even more dubiously that they might be swans.
"Or geese," Mary had muttered sharply, whereupon Madame Diana had turned sulky and complained that she could not hope to have any success with the crystal when scoffers were present.
"The woman's an obvious fraud with her pigeons," Mary declared; and she turned her attention to a husband for Pierrette, a commodity which was unprocurable in Paris. A friend assured her that the best European strain of Siamese cats was to be found in Vienna, and in spite of the difficulties of traveling Mary would have set out for Vienna if another friend had not suggested that the famous strain would by now probably have succumbed to the effects of the war. In the end, she went to England, accompanied by Pierrette, for by now nothing else mattered except that Pierrette should have kittens.
Mary took rooms in the Victoria Palace Hotel overlooking Kensington Gardens, where with Célestine and Pierrette she settled down to spend Christmas. The gayety of the golden shops in High Street reminded her too poignantly of Christmastides when the boys came home from school for the holidays; and when Muriel who had heard of her mother's arrival in England wrote to suggest that she should spend Christmas as the guest of the Community, it seemed a wise way of escaping from the sadness of memory.
The house of which Muriel was sister-in-charge was in a remote Gloucestershire village and was used as a home for old women whom the Order befriended. Mary felt rather like one of those old women herself when she attended vespers in the little chapel on the evening of her arrival. It did not seem credible that the capable sister of whom everybody, including herself, stood so much in awe was her own daughter. Muriel appeared not a day older than when she entered the Order ten years ago.
"I was wrong, dear," her mother said, when she was sitting in the parlor with Muriel during recreation on Christmas Eve. "I was quite wrong, dear, to oppose your becoming a nun. Your intention took me so completely by surprise that I never had time to imagine the lines on which you might develop. It is only now when I see you mistress of your own house, as it were, that I realize how perfectly the life suits your temperament."
And that night when after Mass the old women, flotsam from life's seat at last forever still, knelt round the crib where lay the image of the infant Saviour, Mary began to apprehend that there was in the Christian religion something more satisfying than the ambiguous promises and performances of crystal-gazers, than the always to be suspected rappings and tappings of mediums. Her mind went back to hours spent with Mademoiselle Lucinge in her gray room at Châteaublanc when the garden was melodious with autumnal birdsong and above the notes of robin-redbreasts Mademoiselle spoke to her about God. This summer she would revisit Châteaublanc, and perhaps in the little church where her old school-mistress had prayed for the woes of France to be lightened she should find that perfect assurance of something beyond which had been denied to her grandmother, but granted to her own daughter. She looked across to where in the flickering candlelight Muriel knelt praying, her eyes turned heavenward and full of tears. Tears for what? For the mere imagination of the reality of that Divine Infant in the manger of Bethlehem. To Muriel's limpid faith had been granted all that motherhood could confer on woman. To her kneeling there belonged a baby that would never grow up to compass her disillusionment, a baby that promised to all who believed in Him immortal life. Hers, hers by the gift of faith.