Pierre was amazed at the hard heartedness of these _bourgeois_ parents. Luce did not find it extraordinary. "Don't you believe there are a great many people like that? Not wicked. No, I am sure that my grandparents are not, and even believe that it pained them not to say to us: 'Come back!' But their self-respect had been mortified too much. And self-love among these people, there's nothing else that is so great. It is stronger than all the rest. When one has done them wrong it is not merely the wrong that one has done them; there is _the Wrong_; the others are wrong and they themselves are right. And so, without being cruel (no, really, they are not) they would let you die near them at a slow fire rather than concede that perhaps after all they were not right. Oh, they are not the only ones! One meets with many others!... Say, am I mistaken? Aren't they just like that?" Pierre pondered. He was excited. For he was thinking: "Why, yes. That is the way they are...." Through the eyes of the little girl he saw abruptly the penury of heart, the desert-like aridity of this _bourgeois_ class of which he formed a part. Dry and wornout earth which little by little has imbibed all the juices of life and does not renew them any more, just like those lands in Asia where the fecundating rivers, drop by drop, have disappeared under the vitreous sand. Even those whom they believe they love are loved in a proprietary way; they sacrifice them to their egotism, to their buttressed pride, to their narrow and headstrong intelligence. Pierre took a sorrowful review of his parents and himself. He was silent. The panes of the apartment vibrated under the shock of a distant cannonade. And Pierre, who was thinking of those who were dying, said with bitterness: "And that, too, is their work." Yes, the hoarse barking of these cannon away off there, the universal war, the grand catastrophe--the dryness of heart and the inhumanity of that braggart and limited _bourgeoisie_ had a large part in the responsibility for all that. And now (which was only just) the unchained monster would never stop until it had devoured them. And Luce said: "That is true." For without knowing that she did so she followed the thought of Pierre. He started at the echo: "Yes, it is true," said he, "what has come about is just. This world was too old; it ought to, it must die." And Luce, bowing her head, sorrowful and resigned, said once more: "Yes." Solemn faces of children bent beneath Destiny, whose youthful brows touched by the wing of care bore within them such distressful ponderings!...