"What is in that letter?" asked Marthe.
"My resignation."
"Your resignation! The resignation of your professorship?"
"Yes. I shall send this letter the moment I have confessed everything to my father. I did not like to tell you before, for fear of your objections.... But I was wrong.... It is necessary that you should know...."
"I don't understand," she stammered. "I don't understand...."
"Yes, you do, Marthe: you understand. The ideas which have taken possession of me little by little and to which I want to devote myself without reserve are dangerous for young brains to listen to. They form the belief of an age for which I call with might and main, but it is not the belief of to-day; and I have no right to teach it to the children entrusted to my care."
She was on the verge—thinking of her own children, whose well-being and whose future were about to suffer through this decision—she was on the verge of exclaiming:
"Why need you shout it from the house-tops? Stifle your vain scruples and go on teaching what you find in the manuals and school-books."
But she knew that he was like those priests who prefer to incur poverty and opprobrium rather than preach a religion which they no longer believe.
And she simply said: