s, by multiplying the family by the family, has created
a great evil,--namely, individualism.

In the depths of this solitude where their girlhood was spent, Angelique
and Eugenie seldom saw their father, and when he did enter the grand
apartment of his wife on the first floor, he brought with him a saddened
face. In his own home he always wore the grave and solemn look of a
magistrate on the bench. When the little girls had passed the age of
dolls and toys, when they began, about twelve, to use their minds (an
epoch at which they ceased to laugh at Schmucke) they divined the secret
of the cares that lined their father's forehead, and they recognized
beneath that mask of sternness the relics of a kind heart and a fine
character. They vaguely perceived how he had yielded to the forces of
religion in his household, disappointed as he was in his hopes of a
husband, and wounded in the tenderest fibres of paternity,--the love of
a father for his daughters. Such griefs were singularly moving to the
hearts of the two young girls, who were themselves deprived of all
tenderness. Sometimes, when pacing the garden between his daughters,
with an arm round each little waist, and stepping with their own short
steps, the father would stop short behind a clump of trees, out of sight
of the house, and kiss them on their foreheads; his eyes, his lips, his
whole countenance expressing the deepest commiseration.

"You are not very happy, my dear little girls," he said one day; "but I
shall marry you early. It will comfort me to have you leave home."

"Papa," said Eugenie, "we have decided to take the first man who
offers."

"Ah!" he cried, "that is the bitter fruit of such a system. They want to
make saints, and they make--" he stopped without ending his sentence.

Often the two girls felt an infinite tenderness in their father's
"Adieu," or in his eyes, when, by chance, he dined at home. They pitied
that father so seldom seen, and love follows often upon pity.

This stern and rigid education was the cause of the marriages of the two
sisters welded together by misfortune, as Rita-Christina by the hand
of Nature. Many men, driven to marriage, prefer a girl taken from a
convent, and saturated with piety, to a girl brought up to worldly
ideas. There seems to be no middle course. A man must marry either an
educated girl, who reads the newspapers and comments upon them, who
waltzes with a dozen young men, goes to the theatre, devours novel