desire.

She had her little hut: she could get her bread; she lived with the
flowers; the neighbors were good to her, and now and then, on a saint's
day, she too got her day in the woods; it never occurred to her that her
lot could be better.

But sometimes sitting, looking at the dark old beauty of the Broodhuis,
or at the wondrous carven fronts of other Spanish houses, or at the
painted stories of the cathedral windows, or at the quaint colors of the
shipping on the quay, or at the long dark aisles of trees that went away
through the forest, where her steps had never wandered,--sometimes Bébée
would get pondering on all this unknown world that lay before and behind
and around her, and a sense of her own utter ignorance would steal on
her; and she would say to herself, "If only I knew a little--just a very
little!"

But it is not easy to know even a very little when you have to work for
your bread from sunrise to nightfall, and when none of your friends know
how to read or write, and even your old priest is one of a family of
peasants, and can just teach you the alphabet, and that is all. For
Father Francis could do no more than this; and all his spare time was
taken up in digging his cabbage plot and seeing to his beehives; and the
only books that Bébée ever beheld were a few tattered lives of saints
that lay moth-eaten on a shelf of his cottage.

But Brussels has stones that are sermons, or rather that are quaint,
touching, illuminated legends of the Middle Ages, which those who run may
read.