"Why, how do you mean?" she says in her calm way.
"Teaching her things that's all right for us older people to know but that don't seem to me are for young things."
"Teaching her things!" says Mis' MacFarland. "I haven't taught Moira nothing. If you mean them still, quiet, happy spells of hers, she's always had 'em. She taught me. It was watching her when she was little that taught me——"
"Taught you what?" I asked her when she wouldn't go on.
"It's hard to say it in words—taught me how near all the rest is."
I didn't get her, so I asked what she meant by "the rest."
"The rest of creation!" says she. "Some folks is born in the world feeling and knowing it in their hearts that creation don't stop where the sight of the eyes stop, and the thinner the veil is the better, and something in them sickens when the veil gets too thick."
"You talk like you believed in spooks and God knows what," I says, but more to make myself comfortable than anything else.
"You know what I mean, Jane McQuarry," says she. "There's very few folks, especially older ones, who haven't sometimes felt the veil get thinner and thinner until you could see the light shining through. But we've been brought up to think such ideas are silly and to be ashamed of 'em and only to believe in what we can touch and taste and, in spite of stars shining every night over our heads, to think creation stops with heavy things like us. And how anyone who's ever seen a fish swimming in the water can think that—I don't know. What do they know of us and how can they imagine folks on legs walking around and breathing the air that makes 'em die? So why aren't there creatures, all kind of 'em, we can no more see than a fish can us?"
I couldn't answer that, so I went back to Moira.