“Bachi?” said Lowell.

Pietro Bachi had been hired as an Italian instructor by Longfellow years before. The Corporation had never liked the idea of employing foreigners, particularly an Italian papist—the fact that Bachi had been banished by the Vatican did not change their minds. By the time Lowell had assumed control of the department, the Corporation had stumbled upon very reasonable grounds to eliminate Pietro Bachi: his intemperance and insolvency. On the day he was fired, the Italian had grumbled to Professor Lowell, “I shan’t be caught here again, not even dead.” Lowell had, on whatever fancy, taken Bachi at his word.

“My dear professor.” Bachi now offered his hand to his former department head, who pumped vigorously in his usual way.

“Well,” Lowell started, not sure whether to ask how Bachi, plainly alive and breathing, came to be in Harvard Yard.

“Out for a stroll, professor,” Bachi explained. Yet he seemed to be looking anxiously past Lowell, so the professor kept the pleasantries short. But Lowell noticed, as he turned back briefly in increasing wonder at Bachi’s appearance, that Bachi was heading for a vaguely familiar figure. It was the fellow in the black bowler hat and checkered waistcoat, the poetry admirer whom Lowell had seen idling against an American elm some weeks before. Now, what business would he have with Bachi? Lowell planted himself to see whether Bachi would greet the unknown character, who certainly seemed to be waiting for someone. But then a sea of students, grateful to have been released from Greek recitations, swarmed around them, and the curious pair—if the two men were indeed to be spoken of together—were lost to Lowell’s sight.

Lowell, forgetting the scene entirely, started toward the law school, where Oliver Wendell Junior stood surrounded by classmates, explaining to them their mistake on some point of law. The general appearance was not dissimiliar to Dr. Holmes—but it was as though someone had taken the little doctor and stretched him to twice his stature on a rack.

Dr. Holmes idled at the foot of the servants’ stairs of his house. He stopped at a low-hung mirror and flung his thick shock of brown hair to one side with a comb. He thought his face not a very flattering likeness of himself. “More a convenience than an ornament,” he liked to say to people. A complexion one shade darker, the nose shapelier on the incline, the neck more pronounced, he could have been looking at the reflection of Wendell Junior. Neddie, Holmes’s youngest, had been unfortunate enough to align his looks with Dr. Holmes’s, inheriting too his breathing problems. Dr. Holmes and Neddie were Wendells, the Reverend Holmes would have said; Wendell Junior, a pure Holmes. With that blood, Junior would no doubt rise above his father’s name, not only Holmes Esq. but His Excellency Holmes or President Holmes. Dr. Holmes perked up at the sound of heavy boots and swiftly backed into an adjoining room. Then he started for the staircase again with a casual stride, his gaze pointed down in an old book. Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior burst into the house and seemed to make one great leap for the second floor.

“Why, Wendy,” Holmes called out with a quick smile. “That you?”

Junior slowed down midway up the stairs. “Hello, Father.”

“Your mother was just asking had I seen you today, and I realized I had not. Where are you coming from so late in the day, my boy?”

“A walk.”

“That so? Just you?”

Junior paused grudgingly at the landing. Under his dark eyebrows, Junior glared at his father, kneading the wooden baluster at the bottom of the stairs. “I was out talking with James Lowell, as a matter of fact.”

Holmes put on a show of surprise. “Lowell? Have you been spending time together of late? You and Professor Lowell?”

A broad shoulder lifted slightly.

“Well, what is it you talk about with our dear mutual friend, might I ask?” Dr. Holmes went on with an amiable smile.

“Politics, my time in the war, my law classes. We get on quite well, I’d say.”

“Well, you’re spending far too much time in common leisure these days. I order that you cease these trifling excursions with Mr. Lowell!” No reply. “It robs your time for studying, you know. We can’t have that, can we?”

Junior laughed. “Every morning it’s, ‘What’s the point, Wendy? A lawyer can never be a great man, Wendy.’ “ This was said with a light, husky voice. “Now you wish me to study the law harder?”

“Right, Junior. It costs sweat, it costs nerve-fat, it costs phosphorus to do anything worth doing. And I shall have a word with Mr. Lowell about your habits at our next Dante Club session. I’m sure he shall agree with me. He himself was a lawyer once, and knows what it requires.” Holmes started for the hall, rather satisfied in his firm position.

Junior grunted.

Dr. Holmes turned back. “Something more, my boy?”

“I only wonder,” Junior said. “I’d like to hear further about your Dante Club, Father.”

Wendell Junior had never shown any interest in his literary or professional activities. He had never read the doctor’s poems or his first novel, nor had he attended his lyceum lectures on medical advances or the history of poetry. This had been the case more pointedly after Holmes published “My Hunt After the Captain” in The Atlantic Monthly, retelling his journey through the South after receiving a telegram mistakenly reporting Junior’s death on the battlefield.

Junior had in fact skimmed through the proof sheets, feeling his wounds throb as he took it in. He could not believe how his father could think to roll up the war into a few thousand words, which mostly told anecdotes of dying Rebels in hospital beds and hotel clerks in small towns asking if he was not the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.

“I mean,” Junior continued with a cocked grin, “do you really bother calling yourself a member?”

“I beg your pardon, Wendy? What’s the meaning of that? What do you know of it?”

“Only that Mr. Lowell says that your voice is heard mostly at the supper table, not in the study. For Mr. Longfellow, that work is life itself; for Lowell, his calling. You see, he acts on his beliefs, doesn’t just talk of them, just as he did when he defended slaves as a lawyer. For you, it’s just another place to chime glasses.”

“Did Lowell say…” Dr. Holmes began. “Now see here, Junior!” Junior reached the top floor, where he shut himself in his room. “How could you know the first thing about our Dante Club!” Dr. Holmes cried.

Holmes wandered the house helplessly before retiring into his study. His voice heard mostly at table? The more he repeated the allegation to himself, the more stinging it was: Lowell was trying to preserve his place at the right hand of Longfellow by showing himself superior at the expense of Holmes.

With Junior’s words in Lowell’s loud baritone hanging on him, he wrote doggedly over the next weeks, with a sustained progress that did not come to him naturally. The time at which any new thought struck Holmes was his Sibylline moment, but the act of composition usually was attended with a dull, disagreeable sensation about the forehead—interrupted only from time to time by the simultaneous descent of some group of words or unexpected image, which produced a burst of the most insane enthusiasm and self-gratulation and during which he sometimes committed puerile excesses of language and action.

He could not work many hours consecutively, in any case, without deranging his whole system. His feet were apt to get cold, his head hot, his muscles restless, and he would feel as if he must get up. In the evening, he would stop all hard work before eleven o’clock and take a book of light reading to clear his mind of its previous contents. Too much brain work gave him a sense of disgust, like overeating. He attributed this in part to the depleting, nerve-straining qualities of the climate. Brown-Sequard, a fellow medical man from Paris, had said that animals do not bleed so much in America as they did in Europe. Was that not startling to think? Despite this biological shortcoming, Holmes now felt himself writing like a madman.