9/31 As soon as he could, he ordered an evening paper and sat concealed behind it--truly British in every outline. The music in the place was good, but no music appealed to him. It came as a confused wreckage of sounds to his ears as he read through the news of the evening; and when the girl rattled her spoon on the coffee cup and the young man clapped his hands vigorously at the conclusion of a selection, he looked over the top of his paper with annoyance. What music had ever penetrated his understanding of the art, had come in the form of chants of psalms and old hymn tunes, which a constant attendance at church in his youth had dinned into him--the driving of soft iron nails into the stern oak. He sang these laboriously with numberless crescendos as he dressed in the mornings. |