“Haven't you noticed, Gretta, how he's losing his grip?”
At that his head went up sharply; he stood altogether tense as he waited for Gretta to set the other girl right—Gretta, so sure-seeing, so much wiser and truer than the rest of them. Gretta would laugh!
But she did not laugh. And what his strained ear caught at last was—not her scornful denial, but a little gasp of breath suggesting a sob.
“Noticed it? Why it breaks my heart!”
He stared at the books through which her low, passionate voice had carried. Then he sank to the chair that fortunately was beside him. Power for standing had gone from him.
“Father says—father's on the board, you know” (it was the first girl who spoke)—“that they don't know what to do about it. It's not justice to the school to let him begin another year. These things are arranged with less embarrassment in the big schools, where a man begins emeritus at a certain time. Though of course they'll pension him—he's done a lot for the school.”
He thanked Gretta for her little laugh of disdain. The memory of it was more comforting—more satisfying—than any attempt to put it into words could have been.
He heard them move away, their skirts brushing the book-stacks in passing. A little later he saw them out in the sunshine on the campus. Gretta joined one of the boys for a game of tennis. Motionless, he sat looking out at her. She looked so very young as she played.
For an hour he remained at the table in the alcove where he had overheard what his students had to say of him. And when the hour had gone by he took up the pen which was there upon the study table and wrote his resignation to the secretary of the board of trustees. It was very brief—simply that he felt the time had come when a younger man could do more for the school than he, and that he should like his resignation to take effect at the close of the present school year. He had an envelope, and sealed and stamped the letter—ready to drop in the box in front of the building as he left. He had always served the school as best he could; he lost no time now, once convinced, in rendering to it the last service he could offer it—that of making way for the younger man.
Looking things squarely in the face, and it was the habit of a lifetime to look things squarely in the face, he had not been long in seeing that they were right. Things tired him now as they had not once tired him. He had less zest at the beginning of the hour, more relief at the close of it. He seemed stupid in not having seen it for himself, but possibly many people were a little stupid in seeing that their own time was over. Of course he had thought, in a vague way, that his working time couldn't be much longer, but it seemed part of the way human beings managed with themselves that things in even the very near future kept the remoteness of future things.