one, we passed entire nights together.
Once after a concert he suddenly exclaimed: "Don't you think Wagner was
a ---- fraud?"

A little surprised even by one of his outbreaks, I said: "Wagner may
have written some trick music but I hardly think that he was a fraud."

He reflected a moment. "Well," he continued, "it may not lie in my
mouth to say it--and perhaps I ought not to say it--I know I am most
responsible for the Wagner craze--but I consider him a ---- fraud."

He had just come from a long "classic entertainment," was worn out with
travel and worry, and meant nothing of the sort.

After a very tiresome concert when he was railing at the hard lines of
a peripatetic musician I said: "Come with me and I will give you a
soothing quail and as dry a glass of champagne as you ever had in your
life."

The wine was poured out and he took a sip.

"I don't call that dry wine," he crossly said, and took another sip. "My
God," without a pause he continued, "isn't that great?"

Of course he was impulsive, even impetuous. Beneath his seeming cold
exterior and admirable self-control--the discipline of the master
artist--lay the moods and tenses of the musical temperament. He knew
little or nothing outside of music and did not care to learn. I tried
to interest him in politics. It was of no use. First he laughed my
suggestions to scorn and then swore like a trooper. German he was,
through and through. It was well that he passed away before the world
war. Pat Gilmore--"Patrick Sarsfield," we always called him--was a
born politician, and if he had not been a musician he would have been
a statesman. I kept the peace between him and Theodore Thomas by an
ingenious system of telling all kinds of kind things each had said of
the other, my "repetitions" being pure inventions of my own.

Chapter the Fourteenth

Henry Adams and the Adams Family--John Hay and Frank Mason--The Three
_Mousquetaires_ of Culture--Paris--"The Frenchman"--The South of
France

I

I have been of late reading The Education of Henry Adams, and it recalls
many persons and incidents belonging to the period about which I am now
writing. I knew Henry Adams well; first in London, then in Boston and
finally throughout his prolonged residence in Washington City. He was an
Adams; very definitely an Adams, but, though his ghost may revisit the
glimpses of the moon and chide me for saying so, with an English "cut to
his jib."

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