Young Adams had nothing to do
but take fencing-lessons, visit the galleries and go to the
theatre; but his social failure in the line of "The Initials,"
was humiliating and he succumbed to it. The Frau Hofrathin
herself was sometimes roused to huge laughter at the total
discomfiture and helplessness of the young American in the face
of her society. Possibly an education may be the wider and the
richer for a large experience of the world; Raphael Pumpelly and
Clarence King, at about the same time, were enriching their
education by a picturesque intimacy with the manners of the
Apaches and Digger Indians. All experience is an arch, to build
upon. Yet Adams admitted himself unable to guess what use his
second winter in Germany was to him, or what he expected it to
be. Even the doctrine of accidental education broke down. There
were no accidents in Dresden. As soon as the winter was over, he
closed and locked the German door with a long breath of relief,
and took the road to Italy. He had then pursued his education, as
it pleased him, for eighteen months, and in spite of the infinite
variety of new impressions which had packed themselves into his
mind, he knew no more, for his practical purposes, than the day
he graduated. He had made no step towards a profession. He was as
ignorant as a schoolboy of society. He was unfit for any career
in Europe, and unfitted for any career in America, and he had not
natural intelligence enough to see what a mess he had thus far
made of his education.
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