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.  But—­it is a reluctant confession—­you were tired of your relations; you were weary of their bonnets.  Measured by adult time, those bonnets were, it is to be presumed, of no more than reasonable duration; they had no more than the average or common life.  You have no reason, looking back, to believe that your great-aunts wore bonnets for great and indefinite spaces of time.  But, to your sense as a child, long and changing and developing days saw the same harassing artificial flowers hoisted up with the same black lace.  You would have had a scruple of conscience as to really disliking the face, but you deliberately let yourself go in detesting the bonnet.  So with dresses, especially such as had any little misfit about them.  For you it had always existed, and there was no promise of its ceasing.  You seemed to have been aware of it for years.  By the way, there would be less cheap reproving of little girls for desiring new clothes if the censors knew how immensely old their old clothes are to them.