When he was back at Plashers Mead, his resolution did not weaken: coldly and unsentimentally he began to eviscerate the already mutilated library. At the end of his task he had stacked upon the floor five hundred volumes to be offered as a bargain to the bookseller who had bought the others. All that was left indeed were the cheapest and most ordinary editions of poets, one or two volumes of the greatest of all like Rabelais and Cervantes, and the eternally read and most companionable like Boswell and Gilbert White and Sir Thomas Browne. In the determination that had seized him he rejoiced in his bare shelves, so much exalted by the glories of abnegation that he began to despise himself in his former attitude as a trifler among books and to say to himself, as he looked at the volumes which had survived this heartless clearance, that now he was set on the great fairway of literature without any temptation to diverge up the narrow streams of personal taste. The bookseller's assistant was not at all eager for the proferred bargain, and in the end Guy could only manage to obtain the £30 and not, as he had hoped, another £10 towards his debts. Nevertheless he locked the cheque up in his desk with the satisfaction of a man who for the first time in his life earns money, and later on went across to tell Pauline the result of the visit to London. There was a smell of frost in the air that afternoon, and the sharpness of the weather consorted well with Guy's mood, taking away the heavy sense of disappointment and giving him a sparkling hopefulness. He and Pauline went for a walk on Wychford down, and in the wintry cheer he would not allow her to be cast down at the loss of his books or to resent Worrall's reception of the poems. "Everything is all right," he assured her. "The more we have to deny ourselves now, the greater will be my success when it comes. The law of compensation never fails. You and I are Davidsbündler marching against the Philistines. So be brave, my Pauline." "I will try to be brave," she promised. "But it's harder for me because I'm doing nothing." "Oh, nothing," said Guy. "Nothing except endow me with passion and ambition, with consolation ... oh, nothing, you foolish one." "Am I really all that to you?" "Forward," he shouted, hurling his stick in front of him and dragging Pauline at the heels of Bob across turf that was already beginning to crackle in the frost. Pauline could not resist his confidence, and when at last they had to turn round and leave a smoky orange sunset, they came home glowing to the Rectory, both in the highest spirits. Guy wrote to the publisher that night and announced his intention of accepting the "offer," a word which he could not resist framing with inverted commas in case the sarcastic shaft might pierce Mr. Worrall's hard and conical head.