The idea suited Adams's desperate frame
of mind. At least it ridded him of the university and the Civil
Law and American associations in beer-cellars. Mr. Apthorp took
the trouble to negotiate with the head-master of the
Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium for permission to Henry
Adams to attend the school as a member of the Ober-tertia, a
class of boys twelve or thirteen years old, and there Adams went
for three months as though he had not always avoided high schools
with singular antipathy. He never did anything else so foolish
but he was given a bit of education which served him some purpose
in life.
It was not merely the language, though three months passed in
such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman,
and this was all that foreign students could expect to do, for
they never by any chance would come in contact with German
society, if German society existed, about which they knew
nothing. Adams never learned to talk German well, but the same
might be said of his English, if he could believe Englishmen. He
learned not to annoy himself on this account. His difficulties
with the language gradually ceased. He thought himself quite
Germanized in 1859. He even deluded himself with the idea that he
read it as though it were English, which proved that he knew
little about it; but whatever success he had in his own
experiment interested him less than his contact with German
education.
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