the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt two)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

The elder personalities of Red Cloud proved nearly as influential on her as family. There was, for example, the Englishman William Ducker, outwardly a failure, who clerked in his prosperous brother’s dry goods store and in the evenings read Virgil, Ovid, Homer, and Anacreon with Willa. She would arrive at the University of Nebraska with a solid grounding in classical languages. Ducker was an amateur scientist as well, with a laboratory fitted up at home. Willa assisted him at his experiments. He was her first encounter with a freethinker and set the pattern for her own intellectual outlook. Edith Lewis reports that one afternoon “she was accompanying him home, and he said to her ‘It’s just as if the lights were going out, Willie.’ After she left him a child came running to call her back. She found Mr. Ducker dead, a copy of the Iliad lying open on the floor beside him.”