Once more the newspapers explained; the battle was won, and the no-encore rule has prevailed at the Philadelphia Orchestra concerts from that day to this, with the public entirely resigned to the idea and satisfied with the reason therefor.
But the bewildered Bok could not make out exactly what had happened to his preconceived notion about symphonic music.

He attended the following Saturday evening concert; listened to a Brahms symphony that pleased him even more than had "The New World," and when, two weeks later, he heard the Tschaikowski "Pathetique" and later the "Unfinished" symphony, by Schubert, and a Beethoven symphony, attracted by each in turn, he realized that his prejudice against the whole question of symphonic music had been both wrongly conceived and baseless.
He now began to see the possibility of a whole world of beauty which up to that time had been closed to him, and he made up his mind that he would enter it.

Somehow or other, he found the appeal of music did not confine itself to women; it seemed to have a message for men.

Then, too, instead of dreading the approach of Saturday evenings, he was looking forward to them, and invariably so arranged his engagements that they might not interfere with his attendance at the orchestra concerts.
After a busy week, he discovered that nothing he had ever experienced served to quiet him so much as these end-of-the-week concerts.

They were not too long, an hour and a half at the utmost; and, above all, except now and then, when the conductor would take a flight into the world of Bach, he found he followed him with at least a moderate degree of intelligence; certainly with personal pleasure and inner satisfaction.
Bok concluded he would not read the articles he had published on the meaning of the different "sections" of a symphony orchestra, or the books issued on that subject.