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 laws, 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