Laura herself was more serious. She had begun a course of reading; no novels, but solemn works full of allusions to “Man” and “Destiny,” which she underlined and annotated. Twice a week⁠—on Mondays and Thursdays⁠—she took a French lesson. Corthell managed to enlist the good services of Mrs. Wessels and escorted her to numerous piano and cello recitals, to lectures, to concerts. He even succeeded in achieving the consecration of a specified afternoon once a week, spent in his studio in the Fine Arts’ Building on the Lake Front, where he read to them “Saint Agnes Eve,” “Sordello,” “The Light of Asia”⁠—poems which, with their inversions, obscurities, and astonishing arabesques of rhetoric, left Aunt Wess’ bewildered, breathless, all but stupefied.

Laura found these readings charming. The studio was beautiful, lofty, the light dim; the sound of Corthell’s voice returned from the thick hangings of velvet and tapestry in a subdued murmur. The air was full of the odor of pastilles.