French, for example, and music! Why, if so disposed, Marie
Bashkirtseff might have read old French romances at ten, and to play
Chopin at an earlier age was not surprising in the opportunitied,
so-called "aristocratic" infant. Oh, why had they not been born like the
other Sidonians, whose natures and ideals had been mercifully calculated
to the meridian of Sidon! Why didn't they think the Proudfoots and the
Wilkinsons and the Wagstaffs, and other local nobody-somebodies, people
of importance, and why did they think the mayor a ludicrous upstart,
and the adjacent J.P. a sententious old idiot? Far better to have rested
content in that state of life to which God had called them. To talk
French, or to play Chopin! What did it matter? In one sense nothing, but
in another it mattered like other convenient facilities of life. To the
immortal soul it mattered nothing, but to the mortal social unit it made
life the easier, made the passage of ideas, the intercourse of
individualities, the readier, and, in general, facilitated spiritual and
intellectual, as well as social, communication.
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