e can because ye're
a path--"

It was in this way that Marcella got her education. Most of the time
Wullie talked above her head save when he told her of the habits of
animals and plants, of the winds and the seasons. Her mother, before she
was too ill, had taught her to read and that was all. Even her mother,
drawn in upon herself with pain, talked above her head most of the time,
too. The girl turned herself loose in the big room at the farm where
books were stored and there she spent days on end when the weather was
too wild to be braved. It was a queer collection of books. All Scott's
novels were there; she found in them an enchanted land. She lived them,
she fed on them. She never read herself into the woman's part in them.
Only Jeannie Deans really met her requirements as a "part" and she left
much to be desired in the way of romance and beauty. Most often she was
young Lochinvar or Rob Roy; sometimes Coeur de Lion led her on
full-blooded adventure. There were quaint old books of Norse and Keltic
legend, musty, leather-bound books with wood-cut illustrations and long
"s's" in the printing. There was Fox's Book of Martyrs: there were many
tales of the Covenanters, things hard, austere and chill.

One summer a young student came to the farm for the harvest. He was a
peasant lad, a penniless bursary student at Edinburgh University. In the
Long Vacation, he worked at his native farming, reading voraciously all
the time and feeding sparingly, saving his wages against the coming
bleak winter in his fireless attic in an Edinburgh wynd. He talked to
Marcella, dogmatically, prodigiously, unanswerably. On her legends and
fairy-tales and poetry he poured contempt. He read the "Riddle of the
Universe" and the "Kritic of Pure Reason," orating them to Marcella as
they worked together in the harvest field. She did not even understand
their terminology. He had a quite unreasoning belief in the stolidly
utilitarian of German philosophers and laid siege to Marcella's
mysticism, but after he went back one day she discovered a box of her
mother's poetry books and so Tennyson, Shelley and Keats shone into her
life and, reading an ancient copy of "David and Bethsaibe," she gathered
that the Bible Aunt Janet read sourly had quite human possibilities.
This box of books was her first glimpse of a world that was not a long
tale of stern fights; it was her first glimpse of something softly
sensuous instead of austere and natural and passio