were hard pressed for social connections. A student like H. H.
Richardson, who came from far away New Orleans, and had his
career before him to chase rather than to guide, might make
valuable friendships at college. Certainly Adams made no
acquaintance there that he valued in after life so much as
Richardson, but still more certainly the college relation had
little to do with the later friendship. Life is a narrow valley,
and the roads run close together. Adams would have attached
himself to Richardson in any case, as he attached himself to John
LaFarge or Augustus St. Gaudens or Clarence King or John Hay,
none of whom were at Harvard College. The valley of life grew
more and more narrow with years, and certain men with common
tastes were bound to come together. Adams knew only that he would
have felt himself on a more equal footing with them had he been
less ignorant, and had he not thrown away ten years of early life
in acquiring what he might have acquired in one.

Socially or intellectually, the college was for him negative
and in some ways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world
could not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the
vices were less harmful than the virtues. The habit of drinking
-- though the mere recollection of it made him doubt his own
veracity, so fantastic it seemed in later life -- may have done
no great or permanent harm; but the habit of looking at life as a
social relation -- an affair of society -- did no good. It
cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had
helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and
instincts of any profession -- such as temper, patience,
courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of
opponents -- it would have been education better worth having