'No, I'm going to study that book.' He pointed to it with a shrug.
'What's inside?'
'I don't know what I shall find inside,' he told her.
'Good news or bad? The old story or a new one? I can't tell.'
'You don't mean to tell me—that's clear anyhow,' laughed Trix. 'Impertinent questions politely evaded! I take the hint. Good-bye. And, Mr. Newton—a glimmer of hope!'
'Yes, a glimmer,' he said, passing his hand over his brow rather wearily.
'Well, I must leave you to the secrets of the red book,' she ended.
He came to the top of the stairs with her. Half-way down she turned and kissed her hand to him. Her step was a thousand times more buoyant; her smiles came as though native-born again and no longer timid strangers. Such was the work that a glimmer of hope could do.
To subtract instead of adding, to divide instead of multiplying, to lessen after increase, to draw out instead of paying in—these operations, whether with regard to a man's fame, or his power, or his substance, or even the scope of his tastes and the joy of his recreations, are precisely those which philosophy assumes to teach us to perform gracefully and with no exaggerated pangs. The man himself remains, says popular philosophy; and the pulpit sometimes seconds the remark, adding thereunto illustrative texts. Consolations conceived in this vein are probably useful, even though they may conceal a fallacy or succeed by some pious fraud on the truth. It is a narrow view of a man which excludes what he holds, what he has done and made. If he must lose his grasp on that, part of his true self goes with it. The better teachers inculcate not throwing away but exchange, renunciation here for the sake of acquisition there, a narrowing of borders on one side that there may be strength to conquer fairer fields on the other. Could Airey Newton, who had so often turned in impatience or deafness from the first gospel, perceive the truth of the second? He was left to fight for that—left between the red book and the memory of Trix Trevalla.