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.