'The soäl o' a man,' she repeated more distinctly, 'ye knows what I mean surely?'
Yes, he knew what she meant, but he knew also that his own most honest convictions hovered between a materialist philosophy and faith in the spiritual unseen. If at that moment he could have decided between the two he would gladly have done so, for the sake of the eager woman sitting at his feet, but he knew that he did not know which was the truth.
She, still labouring under the impression that she had not made her meaning plain, endeavoured to explain. 'Ye knows when a man dies, there's two parts to him; one they buries, and one goes—' she pointed upward with her thumb, not irreverently, but as merely wishing to indicate a fact without the expense of words.
'Yes, I understand what you mean,' he said slowly, 'and under that theory, the soul——'
'Under what?' she said sharply.
'I mean that if you say the soul is divided from the body at death——'
'But it is—ain't it?' she interrupted.
'Yes, it is,' he said, feeling that it was better to perjure himself than to shake her faith.
'Go on,' she said, 'for parson says the soäl is the thing inside that thinks; but when a man's luny, ye knows—off his head like—has he no soäl then? I've looked i' the Catechis', an' i' Bible, an' i' Prayer-book, an' fur the life o' me, I doän't know.'
'I don't wonder at that,' he said, with mechanical compassion, casting about in his mind for some possible motive for her extraordinary vehemence.