The Lost Prince by Selden Edwards Page A

a Joan of Arc on our hands.”
    “And what was it that so distinguished the thesis?” Eleanor asked.
    “It was a brilliant idea,” William James said, “conversations with acharacter who had come to him in a dream. He got the idea from me. I got the idea from you when you were fresh back from Vienna. You got it from a wise man of your acquaintance there.”
    “I do remember telling you that,” she said. “The idea had made quite an impression on me, and was helpful at the time.”
    “Well, I don’t remember passing it along in a lecture to Harvard students,” he said. “Still, Honeycutt here wrote a rather astounding dialogue, and it made a powerful impression. The department asked him to defend himself, which is an uncommon practice for an undergraduate thesis.”
    “And he did well, I assume.”
    “It was quite a show,” William James said. “Mr. Honeycutt is not exactly normal; he is overly brusque, but brilliant, something of a savant, I am told. He is painfully inept at human interaction.”
    “What is he like?”
    “Well, he is definitely an original specimen. One of the skeptics asked young Honeycutt why he chose this man Democritus, and he answered imperiously, ‘I did not choose him, sir. Democritus chose me.’
    “When another asked if he often heard voices, the young man answered in the affirmative, which did not help his case. The department has taken him on as a graduate student, some with great reluctance, and they are asking him to give proof to the many radical assertions made out of his extraordinary imaginings. The department is still split, I hear, as to the state of the young man’s mind, and whether this defense can be made. But they all are in agreement on one aspect: His is an exceptional mind.”
    “And you know of no other of the same name?” she asked abruptly, realizing the complexity she was about to step into here by pursuing this young man.
    “T. Williams Honeycutt?” William James said, and Eleanor nodded. The great man thought for a long moment. “No,” he said, with a kind of certainty. “Not in my ken.”

    And all other research went nowhere. This controversial young graduate student about her age, in the department of physics, was her only possibility, it turned out, at least in the Boston area. And so, with no other options in front of her, and reasoning that T. Williams Honeycutt was an unusual and perhaps unique name, she made an appointment, which surprisedthe young man no doubt, since Ted Honeycutt, by his own admission, was not the type who made many outside appointments, certainly not with attractive young women.
    They met on the Harvard campus, in the ancient hall that housed the physics department, in a small office cluttered with books and laboratory paraphernalia. As Eleanor engaged him in conversation, she could not help recalling some of the pejorative comments she had heard about him in her researches.
    “He talks to himself,” a fellow graduate student assigned as his laboratory partner is reported to have complained to his advisor.
    “Listen well,” the advisor is said to have quipped. “You might learn something.”
    Even before his famous senior thesis, just as one faculty member was tearing his hair in exasperation another was reporting a conversation with him that showed great vision and clarity. In one famous faculty discussion, one teacher is reported to have said, “Honeycutt is the kind of mind that every university would like to have within its walls.”
    “There is another institution down the road,” a colleague responded, “the state hospital, that specializes in having his kind within its walls.”
    Whatever talents or future this young graduate student possessed were not immediately apparent to her as she sat with him in his cluttered little room. In fact, her immediate reaction was to wonder how someone this disorganized had earned his strong reputation. Later, she admitted to being suspicious, discouraged even, but she was