silk handkerchief, my sole luxury, was the full extent of my
wardrobe.

When the wet rain splashed my face as I walked the boulevards on the
morning of the examination I was not cast down. I had determined to do
or die. With a hundred of my sort, both sexes and varying nationality, I
was penned up in a room, one door of which opened on the stage of the
Conservatory theater. I looked about me. Giggling girls in crumpled
white dresses stalked up and down humming their arias, while shabbily
dressed mothers gazed admiringly at them. Big boys and little, bad boys
and good, slim, fat, stupid, shrewd boys, encircled me, and, as I was
mature for my age, joked me about my senile appearance. I had a numbered
card in my hand, No. 13, and all those who saw it shuddered, for the
French are as stupid as old-time Southern "darkies." Something akin to
the expectant feeling of the early Christian martyrs was experienced by
all of us as a number was called aloud by a hoarse-voiced Cerberus, and
the victim disappeared through the narrow door leading to the lions in
the arena. At last, after some squabbling between No. 14 and No. 15,
both of whom thought they had precedence over No. 13, I went forth to
my fate.

I came out upon a dimly lighted stage which held two grand pianofortes
and several chairs. A colorless-looking individual read my card and with
marked asperity asked for my music. Frightened, I told him I had brought
none. There were murmurings and suppressed laughter in the dim
auditorium. _There_ sat the judges--I don't know how many, but one was a
woman, and I hated her though I could not see her. She had a
disagreeable laugh, and she let it loose when the assistant professor on
the platform stumbled over the syllables of my very Teutonic name. I
explained that I had memorized a Beethoven sonata, all the Beethoven
sonatas, and that was the reason I left my music at home. This
explanation was received in chilly silence, though I did not fail to
note that it prejudiced the interrogating professor against me. He
evidently took me for a superior person, and he then and there mentally
proposed to set me down several pegs. I felt, rather than saw, all this
in the twinkling of an eye. I sat down to the keyboard and launched
forth into Beethoven's first _Sonata in F minor_, a favorite of mine.
Ominous silence broken by the tapping of a nervous lead pencil in the
hand of a nervous woman. I got through the movement and then a voice
punc