As to the length of Beethoven, experienced by you on duty in the drawing
room, it would be curious to know whether it was really something greater
than Beethoven had any idea of. You sat and listened, and tried to fix a
passage in your mind as a kind of half-way mark, with the deliberate
provident intention of helping yourself through the time during a future
hearing; for you knew too well that you would have to bear it all again.
You could not do the same with sermons, because, though even more
fatiguing, they were more or less different each time.
While your elders passed over some particularly tedious piece of road--and
a very tedious piece of road existed within short distance of every house
you lived in or stayed in--in their usual state of partial absence of
mind, you, on the contrary, perceived every inch of it. As to the length
of a bad night, or of a mere time of wakefulness at night, adult words do
not measure it; they hardly measure the time of merely waiting for sleep
in childhood. Moreover, you were tired of other things, apart from the
duration of time--the names of streets, the names of tradesmen,
especially the _fournisseurs_ of the household, who lived in them.
You were bored by people. It did not occur to you to be tired of those
of your own immediate family, for you loved them immemorially. Nor were
you bored by the newer personality of casual visitors, unless they held
you, as aforesaid, and made you so listen to their unintelligible voices
and so look at their mannered faces that they released you an older child
than they took you prisoner.
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