"So it ought to help you! It will help you. It will help you to be what you are trying to be. There are things here that you have sought and have never found. There are characters here whom you have wished to meet without ever having known that they existed. If you will always live by what is best in this book, love the best that it loves, hate what it hates, scorn what it scorns, follow its ideals to the end of the world, to the end of your life --" "Oh, but give it to me!" he cried, lifting himself impulsively on one elbow and holding out his hand for it. She came silently over to the bedside and placed it on his hand. He studied the title wonderingly, wonderingly turned some of the leaves, and at last, smiling with wonder still, looked up at her. And then he forgot the book--forgot everything but her. Once upon a time he had been walking along a woodland path with his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him as was his studious wont. In the path itself there had not been one thing to catch his notice: only brown dust--little stones--a twig--some blades of withered grass. Then all at once out of this dull, dead motley of harmonious nothingness, a single gorgeous spot had revealed itself, swelled out, and disappeared: a butterfly had opened its wings, laid bare their inside splendours, and closed them again--presenting to the eye only the adaptive, protective, exterior of those marvellous swinging doors of its life. He had wondered then that Nature could so paint the two sides of this thinnest of all canvases: the outside merely daubed over that it might resemble the dead and common and worthless things amid which the creature had to live--a masterwork of concealment; the inside designed and drawn and coloured with lavish fullness of plan, grace of curve, marvel of hue--all for the purpose of the exquisite self revelation which should come when the one great invitation of existence was sought or was given. As the young school-master now looked up--too quickly--at the woman who stood over him, her eyes were like a butterfly's gorgeous wings that for an instant had opened upon him and already were closing--closing upon the hidden splendours of her nature--closing upon the power to receive upon walls of beauty all the sunlight of the world. "What a woman!" he said to himself, strangely troubled a moment later when she was gone. He had not looked at the book again. It lay forgotten by his pillow. "What a woman!" he repeated, with a sigh that was like a groan. Her bringing of the book--her unusual conversation--her excitement--her seriousness--the impression she made upon him that a new problem was beginning to work itself out in her life--most of all that one startling revelation of herself at the instant of turning away: all these occupied his thoughts that day.