to waste in trying to ascertain our destiny before and after our brief appearance on earth. We shall never solve that enigma. It is our bounden duty to work incessantly here on earth and to go hence without a murmur. We must account for our labors to the generation that precedes us and shapes us, and to that which follows us and which we shape. That is why family bonds are sacred and the rights of inheritance inalienable, despite your fine communistic theories, which I have never been able to understand, because they are not ripe and the human race must still wait for centuries before accepting them. Tell me, what do you propose to do?" "I have absolutely no idea," replied Emile, overwhelmed by this avalanche of narrow-minded, cold commonplaces, uttered with brutal and arrogant fluency. "You solve with so much assurance questions which it will probably require my whole life to solve, that I am unable to follow you in this ardent race toward an unknown goal. I am too weak and my intelligence is apparently too limited to find in my own energy the motive or the reward of so many efforts. My tastes in no wise incline me to make them. I love mental labor, and I should love bodily labor, if it should become the servant of the other in procuring the gratification of the heart; but to work in order to hoard, to hoard in order to retain and increase one's hoard, until death puts an end to this unreasoning thirst--that has neither sense nor any attraction to me. I possess no faculty which you can employ for that object; I am not born a gambler and the enthralling chances of the rise and fall of my fortune will never cause me the slightest emotion. If my aspirations and my enthusiasm are chimeras unworthy of a serious mind, if there is no eternal truth, no divine reason for the existence of things, no ideal which we can carry in our heart to sustain ourselves and guide our footsteps through the evils and injustices of the present, then I no longer exist, I no longer believe in anything; I consent to die for you, father; but as to living and struggling like you and with you, I have neither the heart nor the arm nor the head for that sort of work." Monsieur Cardonnet quivered with rage, but he restrained himself. Not without design had he thus awkwardly aroused his son's indignation and spirit of resistance. He had determined to lead him on to speak out his whole thought, and to test his enthusiasm, so to speak. When he realized from the young man's bitter tone and desperate expression that it really was as serious as he had feared, he determined to go around the obstacle and to manœuvre in such a way as to recover his influence. XIII THE STRUGGLE