On this last point M. Brodard went much further than anything I had heard discussed at home, and poured out incessantly in brilliant editorials a torrent of scorn, laughter, hatred, and denunciation, upon the sacred institution of inheritance, the very keystone of the French social edifice. “How ridiculous,” he used to write on mornings when no other forlorn hope stood in special need of a harebrained charge, “that the mere chance of birth, or a personal caprice, should put vast sums of unearned wealth into the hands of a man who has not had the slightest connection with its production. Property, the amassing of wealth by a man who has had the acumen and force to produce it ... we may have two opinions about that, about whether he should be allowed to keep for himself all he can lay his hands on. But there can be no two opinions about the hilarious idiocy of the theory that his grown-up son has any inherent right to possess that wealth, his son who has no more to do with it than the Emperor of China, save by a physiological accident. A hundred years from now, people will be laughing at our imbecile acquiescence in such a theory, as we now laugh at the imbecile acquiescence of whole provinces and kingdoms in the Middle Ages, passed from the hand of one master to another, because somebody had married somebody else.” Mme. Brodard used to say resignedly, that she minded such editorials least of all. “That is a principle that will never touch _our_ lives!” she said with melancholy conviction, for her modest dowry was the extent of their fortune and of their expectations. She herself had been an orphan and all the Brodard elders were dead, having left nothing to the family of such an enemy to society as they considered Bernard to be. She did not complain; she never complained of anything her husband did; but it was plain to see that she thought it her obvious duty to protect her daughters from the consequences of their dear father’s ideas. The income from her dowry kept them at school and dressed them at home, and as the oldest began to approach the marriageable age Mme. Brodard cast about her with silent intensity for some possible means for stretching that dowry to enable Madeleine to make the right sort of match. She knew of course that this was an impossible undertaking; but all her married life had been an impossible undertaking carried through to success, and she did not despair, although there were times when she looked white and anxious.