When his companions insisted on passing two or three afternoons
in the week at music-halls, drinking beer, smoking German
tobacco, and looking at fat German women knitting, while an
orchestra played dull music, Adams went with them for the sake of
the company, but with no presence of enjoyment; and when Mr.
Apthorp gently protested that he exaggerated his indifference,
for of course he enjoyed Beethoven, Adams replied simply that he
loathed Beethoven; and felt a slight surprise when Mr. Apthorp
and the others laughed as though they thought it humor. He saw no
humor in it. He supposed that, except musicians, every one
thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians
thought mathematics a bore. Sitting thus at his beer-table,
mentally impassive, he was one day surprised to notice that his
mind followed the movement of a Sinfonie. He could not have been
more astonished had he suddenly read a new language. Among the
marvels of education, this was the most marvellous. A prison-wall
that barred his senses on one great side of life, suddenly fell,
of its own accord, without so much as his knowing when it
happened. Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor beer,
surrounded by the commonest of German Haus-frauen, a new sense
burst out like a flower in his life, so superior to the old
senses, so bewildering, so astonished at its own existence, that
he could not credit it, and watched it as something apart,
accidental, and not to be trusted.
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