What Passes Through

The night had been clear and hard with cold, and the frost lay late on the yard when the girl crossed it. Inside, the room was warm and even, and the two books sat on the long shelf with the faint sheen of cold gone from their covers. The girl came near and laid her hand flat on the nearer book, the way she had seen Nyra do, and she found the leather warm beneath her palm, warmer than the air, warm as a stone left out in the sun.

She kept her hand there a moment, then turned to Nyra. “The book has taken the warmth of the fire,” she said. “Will it keep it? When the day is old and the grate is grey, will the warmth still be here inside, held the way the words are held?”

Nyra set down the cloth she carried and came to stand beside her. “Put your hand to it again at dusk,” she said, “and you will find it cool, no warmer than the shelf or the wall. The warmth does not stay. It passes through the book the way light passes through a window. By evening it will have gone back into the room, and from the room into the cold, and the book will have kept none of it for its own.”

She rested her own hand beside the smaller one. “But open the cover at dusk, in the cold, and every word will be where it was this morning. That is the difference worth the knowing. The warmth passes through and leaves no mark, and the writing stays and is the book. A thing may be given much that only passes through it, and we are glad of the passing. What it keeps is a smaller matter, and a truer one.”

The girl lifted her hand and felt the small coolness come back into her palm where the warmth had been. She looked at the book, warm now and plain, and thought of it gone cool by evening with every word still in its place. It no longer seemed strange to her that a thing could be given so much and keep none of it. The warmth was a kindness passing through on its way to somewhere else, and the words were what remained, and she was glad the book knew the difference, even if it could never say so.