arts; and
specialists also taught them hygiene: how to walk, sit, breathe; how to
masticate; how to relax after the manner of the domestic cat.

They had memory lessons; lessons in personal physiology, and in first
aid to themselves.

Specialists cared for their teeth, their eyes, their hair, their skin,
their hands and feet.

Everything that was taught them, done for them, indirectly educated them
in the science of self-consideration and deepened an unavoidably natural
belief in their own overwhelming importance. They had not been born so.

But in the house of Seagrave everything revolved around and centred in
them; everything began for them and ended for them alone. They had no
chance.

True, they were also instructed in theology and religion; they became
well grounded in the elements of both,--laws, by-laws, theory, legends,
proverbs, truisms, and even a few abstract truths. But there was no
meaning in either to these little prisoners of self. Seclusion is an
enemy to youth; solitude its destruction.

When the twins were fifteen they went to their first party. A week of
superficial self-restraint and inward delirium was their preparation, a
brief hour of passive bewilderment the realisation. Dazed by the sight
and touch and clamor of the throng, they moved and spoke as in a vision.
The presence of their own kind in such numbers confused them;
overwhelmed, they found no voices to answer the call of happiness. Their
capacity to respond was too limited.

As in a dream they were removed earlier than anybody else--taken away by
a footman and a maid with decorous pomp and circumstance, carefully
muffled in motor robes, and embedded in a limousine.

The daily papers, with that lofty purpose which always characterises
them, recorded next morning the important fact that the famous Seagrave
twins had appeared at their first party.

* * * * *

Between the ages of fifteen and sixteen the twins might have entered
Harvard, for the entrance examinations were tried on both children, and
both passed brilliantly.

For a year or two they found a substitute for happiness in pretending
that they were really at college; they simulated, day by day, the life
that they supposed was led there; they became devoted to their new game.
Excited through tales told by tutor and friend, they developed a
passionate loyalty for their college and class; they were solemnly
elected to coveted societies, they wi