The evening seemed to have lost its balance. They allowed him to fetch his poems, feeling the extent of their indulgence and a sense of imposition. They were already inventing to themselves noncommittal expressions of interest and wondering how soon they might stop him. Their manners preventing an exchange of glances, the three boys smiled down at their plates, comfortably appalled; they were all at once drawn together, dissociated from so flagrant a breach of regulations. It was entirely possible that they also wrote poetry, but only within the bounds of a fastidious reticence. Charles Holmes pushed back his chair a little to stretch his legs and muttered: “Let him read one, then—just one. I’m ready for bed.”

The boy came out of the house again, clutching a bundle of papers. When he placed them on the table, they slid outward—single, scribbled pages of all sizes. Seated, he examined them, rustling through an apprehensive silence. He read to himself for a moment, and his audience suddenly saw that he was no longer intensely aware of them, or, indeed, of himself, and that his face was unrecognizably calm. Even his arm, resting on the table’s edge, was curved toward the papers in a controlled and easy gesture. They were slowly troubled by an idea that formed among them. Without looking about, each knew, too, that it had occurred to the others: an idea almost to be repudiated, requiring, as it did, so much accommodation.

When he had read aloud for a few minutes, the boy looked up, not for commendation but simply to rest his eyes. Charles said quickly: “Go on.” The inclined young face had grown, in the most literal sense, self-possessed. Their approval, so greatly required in another context, had now no importance for him. He spoke as though for himself, distinctly but without emotion, hesitating in order to decipher corrections, scattering his crumpled papers on the table as he discarded them. It seemed that no one moved, although the three boys no longer held identical positions; they had separated into solitary, reflective attitudes that conceded this unlikely triumph.

Assunta came to remove the last dishes, but left, after a moment, without disturbing them. A moth thudded against one of the colored lanterns. The evening was at its best, cool and clear. From time to time, his voice tiring, the boy paused to shuffle his papers, or he made some brief explanatory comment on the subject of a poem before reading it. When someone asked whether this was all recent work—as though it could possibly have been otherwise—he replied that it had all been written in the last year or two. “There are more all the time,” he said, and laid his hand on the shaggy papers as if they had taken him by surprise.