Harry had listened with bated breath, absorbing every tone and inflection of Richard’s voice.  He and Poe had been members of the same university, and the poet had always been one of his idols—­the man of all others he wanted most to know.  Poe’s former room opening into the corridor had invariably attracted him.  He had frequently looked about its bare walls wondering how so great an inspiration could have started from such meagre surroundings.  He had, too, with the romantic imagination of a boy, pictured to himself the kind of man he was, his looks, voice, and manner, and though he had never seen the poet in the flesh, somehow the tones of Richard’s voice recalled to him the very picture he had conjured up in his mind in his boyhood days.

St. George had also listened intently, but the impression was quite different from the one made on the younger man.  Temple thought only of Poe’s despondency, of his striving for a better and happier life; of his poverty—­more than once had he gone down into his own pockets to relieve the poor fellow’s urgent necessities, and he was still ready to do it again—­a readiness in which he was almost alone, for many of the writer’s earlier friends had of late avoided meeting him whenever he passed through Kennedy Square.  Even Kennedy, his life-long friend, had begun to look upon him as a hopeless case.

This antipathy was also to be found in the club.  Even with the memory of Richard’s voice in their ears one of the listeners had shrugged his shoulders, remarking with a bitter laugh that musical as was the poem, especially as rendered by Richard, it was, after all, like most of Poe’s other manuscripts, found in a bottle, or more likely “a bottle found in a manuscript,” as that crazy lunatic couldn’t write anything worth reading unless he was half drunk.  At which St. George had blazed out: 

“Hush, Bowdoin!  You ought to be willing to be blind drunk half your time if you could write one stanza of it!  Please let me have it, Richard,” and he took the sheet from his friend’s hand, that he and Harry might read it at their leisure when they reached home.

Harry’s blood had also boiled at the rude thrust.  While under the spell of Richard’s voice a cord in his own soul had vibrated as does a glass globe when it responds in perfect harmony to a note from a violin.  He too had a Lenore whose loss had wellnigh broken his heart.  This in itself was an indissoluble bond between them.  Besides, he could understand the poet as Alec and his mother and his Uncle George understood himself.  He had begun now to love the man in his heart.

With his mind filled with these thoughts, his hunger for Kate aroused tenfold by the pathos and weird beauty of what he had just heard, he left the group of men who were still discussing the man and his verses, and joined his uncle outside on the top step of the club’s high stoop, from which could be seen the full length of the sun-flecked street on which the clubhouse stood, as well as the park in all its spring loveliness.