‘So trees think too?’
She nodded her head, leaning her chin on her hands as she gazed with him into the misty air.
‘I wonder what their thoughts are like,’ he said musingly, so that she could take it for a question or not as she chose.
‘Like ours—in a way,’ she answered, as though speaking of something she knew beyond all question, ‘only not so small, not so sharp. Our thoughts prick, I think, but theirs stroke, all running quite smoothly into each other. Very big and wonderful indeed thoughts—big as wind, I mean, and wonderful as sky or distance. And the streams—the streams have long, winding thoughts that run down their whole length under water——’
‘And the trees, you were saying,’ he said, seeing that her thought was wandering.
‘Yes, the trees,’ she repeated, ‘oh! yes, the trees are different a little, I think. A wood, you see, may have one big huge thought all at once——’
‘All at once!’
‘I mean all at the same time, every tree thinking the same thought for miles. Because, if you lie in a wood, and don’t think yourself, but just wait and wait and wait, you gradgilly get its great thought and know what it’s thinking about exactly. You feel it all over instead of—of——’
‘Instead of getting a single little sharp picture in your mind,’ Paul helped her, grasping the wonder of her mystical idea.
‘I think that’s what I mean,’ she went on. ‘And it’s exactly the same with everything else—the sea, and the fields, and the sky—oh! and everything in the whole world.’ She made a sweeping gesture with her arm to indicate the universe.