from Conrad the baker. His mother always urged him to
go out and not mope about the house. Sometimes he would walk out with
the new schoolmaster. Constantine he never associated with, except when
it was not to be avoided.

A deep sorrow stole into his heart when he became aware of the
half-concealed dissensions existing between his parents. Before leaving
home he had been so habituated to all the incidents of the household
that it did not occur to him to speculate about them. At the convent
his imagination had pictured home-life as a paradise embosomed in
endless peace: all harsh and uninviting associations had disappeared
from his memory. Thus, he returned to contrast with a highly-wrought
ideal the sober realities of every-day existence; and much that he saw
could not fail to shock him, and perhaps to appear even worse than it
really was. He came fresh from a household where all things moved
according to external laws fixed by unvarying regulations,--where
discussion or contradiction was out of the question as much as in the
interior of a piece of mechanism; and, though depressed by the rigor of
these ordinances, he did not understand that in the free constitution
of a family, where each one acts for the whole according to his
individual judgment, much difference of opinion and many an altercation
is almost inevitable. Even the loud tone of voice in which everybody
spoke was not pleasant; and his father's manner, in particular, was
such as to cause him frequently to shake his head. When his mother
listened in silence to Valentine's expositions of his plans of building
houses "for sale" and without previous orders, he would cry out, "There
it is, you see: you never care a button for what I say: whether a dog
barks, or whether I talk, it's all one to you." If she made objections,
he said, "It's the old story: whatever I want to do never suits you."
If Christina treated him gently and kindly, like one who needed
indulgence, he would perceive it at once, and curse and swear. If, on
the contrary, she was firm and decided, and stood her ground, he said,
"All the world knows you don't live for me, but for your children:
wouldn't you be glad if I was to die?" And then he would sit down,
refusing to eat, or drink, or speak: he would go to the inn, but
without getting any thing to eat there,--as he feared it would make
people talk and grieve his wife,--so that he generally went to bed
without his supper.

When such things hap