“But I insist on the experiment,” bubbled Clayton good-naturedly. “Here we are, hungry as wolves and everything being burned up. Try the suit-of-clothes trick—Kennedy did it—and it won't take your Todd ten minutes to go to Guy's and bring him back inside of them.”
“Those days are over for Poe,” Kennedy remarked with a slight frown. The major's continued allusions to a brother writer's poverty, though pure badinage, had begun to jar on the author.
For the second time Todd's face was thrust in at the door. It now looked like a martyr's being slowly roasted at the stake.
“Yes, Todd—serve dinner!” called St. George in a tone that showed how great was his disappointment. “We won't wait any longer, gentlemen. Geniuses must be allowed some leeway. Something has detained our guest.”
“He's got an idea in his head and has stopped in somewhere to write it down,” continued Clayton in his habitual good-natured tone: it was the overdone woodcock—(he had heard Todd's warning)—that still filled his mind.
“I could forgive him for that,” exclaimed the judge—“some of his best work, I hear, has been done on the spur of the moment—and you should forgive him too, Clayton—unbeliever and iconoclast as you are—and you WOULD forgive him if you knew as much about new poetry as you do about old port.”
Clayton's stout body shook with laughter. “My dear Pancoast,” he cried, “you do not know what you are talking about. No man living or dead should be forgiven who keeps a woodcock on the spit five minutes over time. Forgive him! Why, my dear sir, your poet ought to be drawn and quartered, and what is left of him boiled in oil. Where shall I sit, St. George?”
“Alongside of Latrobe. Kennedy, I shall put you next to Poe's vacant chair—he knows and loves you best. Seymour, will you and Richard take your places alongside of Pancoast, and Harry, will you please sit opposite Mr. Kennedy?”
And so the dinner began.