"It's a lonely-like place to spend the night," she said. "I wonder you're not afraid."
"Sometimes I am," replied Barbara. She recalled nights when she had trembled before the vastness of the hills, when the winds had deafened her with stories of things she could not comprehend, when she had turned from gazing at the cold light of the stars with a fear at her heart, because they would answer nothing to all her questions.
Barbara was not educated as the world counts education. It is true that she knew the fells and dales, the tarns and meres of her native country, as well as the oldest shepherd, who had spent his long life among them. She could tell the names of the constellations, and take her direction upon the darkling moors from them. She knew when to plough and sow and reap. No one was so weather-wise as she in the village. But this is not education in the eyes of the world, and Barbara set little value upon her knowledge. She could not speak the King's English, though she spoke something much more picturesque and vigorous; she only read the simplest books; and wrote an ungainly, but characteristic hand. She knew no history, but her mind was furnished with a collection of tales and legends, which held more of the inner truth of history than the bare facts. Yet she longed with all her ardent nature for the learning contained in books; for the power to grasp the thoughts that flashed across her mind and left upon it an impression as of a great flying light, which, if it had not eluded her, would have illumined her whole being. She pined for the life of the intellect.
"I wish we could get out of our bodies," said she, breaking the long silence. "I wish we could shake them off like an old shift, and leave them here on the grass, while our souls sailed in the air naked-free."
"What a horrid idea!" said Lucy, shrugging her shoulders.
"But our bodies are so earthy—always wanting meat and drink, and crying out for sleep. They throw a shadow on us, like a great rock blocking the light o' the sun."
"I know nought about it," answered Lucy, carelessly.
Barbara laughed at the puzzle of her own thoughts.
"I know nought either," she said; "yet something in me would like to win out if it could."
Lucy went up the sheep-path. On the brow of the knoll she paused, looking back. Barbara was kindling a fire outside the cave, and the smoke, as it coiled upwards, hung between them like a blue veil. Her sister seemed to be moving among mysterious things, and there was symbolical meaning in the blue veil. For two worlds lie side by side, the material and the spiritual, and from either the view into the other seems hazy and unreal. But the greatest intellects try to reconcile them. Towards such a reconciliation Barbara, in her untutored mind, was striving.