Some hours later, when he sat with Adams at dinner, the subject occurred to him again, and he broke in upon a discussion of the varied fortunes of their fellow classmen to allude directly to the cause of his inquietude.

“By the way, I had the pleasure of meeting a protegee of yours the other afternoon,” he said.

Adams met the remark with his whimsical laugh.  “Of mine?  Thank heaven I haven’t any,” he retorted, “but I suppose you mean young Trent, who has just come up from Virginia.”

“I’ve heard something of him from Mrs. Bridewell, I believe,” answered Kemper across the centrepiece of red carnations, “but I haven’t met him as yet—­I was thinking of Miss Wilde when I spoke.  I wish you’d try this sherry—­it’s really first rate—­I brought it over myself.”

When Wilkins had filled his glass, Adams lifted it against the light and looked at the colour of the wine a moment before drinking.  “First rate—­I should say so.  It’s exquisite,” he observed as he touched it to his lips in answer to Kemper’s glance of enquiry.  “Yes, she’s done some rather fine things,” he resumed presently, returning to the subject of Laura, “but she’ll hardly make a popular appeal, I fancy, unless she turns her talent to patriotic airs.  The only poetry we tolerate to-day is the poetry that serves some definite material purpose—­it must either send us into battle or set us to building churches.  The simple spirit of contemplation we’ve come to regard as a pauperising habit and it puts us out of patience.  Great poetry grows out of quiet and nobody is quiet any longer—­a thought no sooner creeps into our head than we begin to talk about it at the top of our voice.”

The branched candlestick at the end of the table shed a glimmering, pearly light upon his face, and Kemper, as he watched him critically, was struck suddenly by the fact that Adams was no longer young.  He could not be over forty, yet his features had the drawn and pallid look of a man who has known, not only ill health, but the shock of emotional catastrophes.  Physically he appeared worn to the point of exhaustion, but if there was pathos in the slight, elastic figure, there was also an impression of power for which the other found it impossible to account.  By mere bodily force Kemper could have thrown Adams from the window with one hand, he realised with a perfectly amiable self-congratulation—­yet in Adams’ presence he invariably felt himself to be the weaker man, and the attitude he unconsciously adopted showed an almost boyish recognition of a superior intelligence.  Something in Roger Adams—­a quality which was neither brute strength nor imperious personality—­exerted a power which Kemper generously admitted to be greater even than these.  Nothing in the man was conspicuous—­he exercised no dominant magnetism—­but the invisible spirit which controlled his life, controlled also, in a measure, the thoughts of those who came directly beneath his influence.  Was it true, Kemper