He turned from the portrait and looked about the room, trying vainly to picture what this woman's life had been, in her solemn high-ceilinged house, alone among her books. He thought of her on winter evenings, sitting at this table, beside the oil lamp with the engraved globe, her queer little spectacles on that long grave nose, poring, poring over the pages, while the wind wailed down the chimney and the snow piled itself up on the lawns. And on summer evenings she sat here too, probably—he could not picture her out of doors; sat here in a slanting light, like that now falling through the wistaria fringes, and leaned her sad head on her hand, and read and read… .

His eyes wandered from the close rows of books on the shelves to the one lying open on the table. That was the book she had been reading when she died—died as a very old woman, and yet so incalculably long ago. Vance moved to the table, and bent over the open page. It was yellow, and blotched with dampness: the type was queer too, different from any that was familiar to him. He read:

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan—"

Oh, what beautiful, what incredible words! What did they mean? But what did it matter what they meant? Or whether they meant anything but their own unutterable music? Vance dropped down into the high-backed armchair by the table, pushed the spectacles away from the page, and read on.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man,

Down to a sunless sea … "

It was a new music, a music utterly unknown to him, but to which the hidden chords of his soul at once vibrated. It was something for him—something that intimately belonged to him. What had he ever known of poetry before? His mind's eye ran over the verse he had been nurtured on: James Whitcomb Riley, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Bliss Carman's "Songs from Vagabondia"; hackneyed old "pieces" from Whittier and Longfellow, in the Sixth Reader; Lowell's "Ode"—there were fine bits in that—Whitman's "Pioneers" (good, too, but rather jiggy); and then the new stuff he had got glimpses of here and there in the magazines, in one or two of the "highbrow" reviews (but these hardly ever came his way), and in his college paper. And he had taken it for granted that he had covered the field of poetry… .