he little thought what he forced upon you; what the things he called
minutes really were, measured by a mind unused; what passive and then
what desperate weariness he held you to by his slightly gesticulating
hands that pressed some absent-minded caress, rated by you at its right
value, in the pauses of his anecdotes. You, meanwhile, were infinitely
tired of watching the play of his conversing moustache.

Indeed, the contrast of the length of contemporary time (this pleonasm is
inevitable) is no small mystery, and the world has never had the wit
fully to confess it.

You remembered poignantly the special and singular duration of some such
space as your elders, perhaps, called half-an-hour--so poignantly that
you spoke of it to your sister, not exactly with emotion, but still as a
dreadful fact of life. You had better instinct than to complain of it to
the talkative, easy-living, occupied people, who had the management of
the world in their hands--your seniors. You remembered the duration of
some such separate half-hour so well that you have in fact remembered it
until now, and so now, of course, will never forget it.

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