bother the drops! Where was she, anyway? Did she intend to stay out
all afternoon? Was that the way she treated an invalid? . . . He
couldn't see why people go out in the rain, anyway. People are apt
to take their deaths of cold. People may get pneumonia. It would
serve people right--almost. . . . One drop--oh, confound the drops!

The professor tried to read. The book he opened had been a famous
novel, a best-seller, some five years ago. It had been thought
"advanced." Advanced!--but now how inconceivably flat and stale! How
on earth had anyone ever praised it, called it "epoch-marking,"
bought it by the thousand thousand? Why, the thing was dead--a dead
book, than which there is nothing deader. This reflection gave him
something to think of for a while. Instead of counting drops he
amused himself by strolling back through the years, a critical
stretcher-bearer, picking up literary corpses by the wayside. They
were thickly strewn. He was appalled to find how faintly beat the
pulse of life even in the living. Would not another generation see
the burial of them all? Was there no new Immortal anywhere?

"When I write a novel," thought the professor solemnly, "which,
please God, I shall never do, I will write about people and not
about things. Things change always; people never." It was a wise
conclusion but it did not help the afternoon to pass.

Desire, that is to say Miss Farr, had passed the window twice
already. He might have called her. But he hadn't. If people forget
one's very existence it is not prideful to call them. And the
Spences are a prideful race. Desire (he decided it didn't matter if
he called her Desire to himself, she was such a child) was wearing--
an old tweed coat and was carrying wood. She wore no hat and her