ly qualities would deteriorate under the powerful
compression of religious ideas pushed to their utmost consequences. Of
four victims the count saved two.

The countess regarded her sons as too ill-trained to admit of the
slightest intimacy with their sisters. All communication between the
poor children was therefore strictly watched. When the boys came home
from school, the count was careful not to keep them in the house. The
boys always breakfasted with their mother and sisters, but after that
the count took them off to museums, theatres, restaurants, or, during
the summer season, into the country. Except on the solemn days of some
family festival, such as the countess's birthday or New Year's day, or
the day of the distribution of prizes, when the boys remained in their
father's house and slept there, the sisters saw so little of their
brothers that there was absolutely no tie between them. On those days
the countess never left them for an instant alone together. Calls
of "Where is Angelique?"--"What is Eugenie about?"--"Where are my
daughters?" resounded all day. As for the mother's sentiments towards
her sons, the countess raised to heaven her cold and macerated eyes, as
if to ask pardon of God for not having snatched them from iniquity.

Her exclamations, and also her reticences on the subject of her sons,
were equal to the most lamenting verses in Jeremiah, and completely
deceived the sisters, who supposed their sinful brothers to be doomed to
perdition.

When the boys were eighteen years of age, the count gave them rooms
in his own part of the house, and sent them to study law under the
supervision of a solicitor, his former secretary. The two Maries knew
nothing therefore of fraternity, except by theory. At the time of the
marriage of the sisters, both brothers were practising in provincial
courts, and both were detained by important cases. Domestic life in
many families which might be expected to be intimate, united, and
homogeneous, is really spent in this way. Brothers are sent to a
distance, busy with their own careers, their own advancement, occupied,
perhaps, about the good of the country; the sisters are engrossed in
a round of other interests. All the members of such a family live
disunited, forgetting one another, bound together only by some feeble
tie of memory, until, perhaps, a sentiment of pride or self-interest
either joins them or separates them in heart as they already are in
fact. Modern law