During that year, and especially in the winter months, he found himself returning more and more frequently to such a state of unreality; at will, he seemed able to remove his consciousness from the body that contained it, and he observed himself as if he were an oddly familiar stranger doing the oddly familiar things that he had to do. It was a dissociated that he had never felt before; he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered. He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.

In its forty-third year William Stoner’s body was nearly as lean as it had been when he was a youth, when he had first walked in dazed awe upon the campus that had never wholly lost its effect upon him. Year by year the stoop of his shoulders had increased, and he had learned to slow his movements so that his farmer’s clumsiness of hand and foot seemed a deliberation rather than an awkwardness bred in the bone. His long face had softened with time; and although the flesh was still like tanned leather, it no longer stretched so tautly over the sharp cheekbones; it was loosened by thin lines around the eyes and mouth. Still sharp and clear, his gray eyes were sunk more deeply in his face, the shrewd watchfulness there half-hidden; his hair, once light brown, had darkened, although a few touches of gray were beginning around his temples. He did not think often of the years, or regret their passing; but when he saw his face in a mirror, or when he approached his reflection in one of the glass doors that led into Jesse Hall, he recognized the changes that had come over him with a mild shock.