During dinner I detected, in the hanging of his flaccid cheeks and the covert glances he cast now and then upon his children, the traces of some wearing thought which showed for a moment upon the surface.  Watching him, who could fail to understand him?  Who would not have seen that he had fatally transmitted to his children those weakly bodies in which the principle of life was lacking.  But if he blamed himself he denied to others the right to judge him.  Harsh as one who knows himself in fault, yet without greatness of soul or charm to compensate for the weight of misery he had thrown into the balance, his private life was no doubt the scene of irascibilities that were plainly revealed in his angular features and by the incessant restlessness of his eye.  When his wife returned, followed by the children who seemed fastened to her side, I felt the presence of unhappiness, just as in walking over the roof of a vault the feet become in some way conscious of the depths below.  Seeing these four human beings together, holding them all as it were in one glance, letting my eye pass from one to the other, studying their countenances and their respective attitudes, thoughts steeped in sadness fell upon my heart as a fine gray rain dims a charming landscape after the sun has risen clear.

When the immediate subject of conversation was exhausted the count told his wife who I was, and related certain circumstances connected with my family that were wholly unknown to me.  He asked me my age.  When I told it, the countess echoed my own exclamation of surprise at her daughter’s age.  Perhaps she had thought me fifteen.  Later on, I discovered that this was still another tie which bound her strongly to me.  Even then I read her soul.  Her motherhood quivered with a tardy ray of hope.  Seeing me at over twenty years of age so slight and delicate and yet so nervously strong, a voice cried to her, “They too will live!” She looked at me searchingly, and in that moment I felt the barriers of ice melting between us.  She seemed to have many questions to ask, but uttered none.

“If study has made you ill,” she said, “the air of our valley will soon restore you.”

“Modern education is fatal to children,” remarked the count.  “We stuff them with mathematics and ruin their health with sciences, and make them old before their time.  You must stay and rest here,” he added, turning to me.  “You are crushed by the avalanche of ideas that have rolled down upon you.  What sort of future will this universal education bring upon us unless we prevent its evils by replacing public education in the hands of the religious bodies?”

These words were in harmony with a speech he afterwards made at the elections when he refused his support to a man whose gifts would have done good service to the royalist cause.  “I shall always distrust men of talent,” he said.

Presently the count proposed that we should make the tour of the gardens.