I do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried in
France; but judging from the appearance of the French people I should
say that a Frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to the
seventeenth degree. The result is that when I cross the Channel I seem
to have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence. It is really
suffering only from the family. Will anyone pretend that England has
not the best of this striking difference? Yet it is such senseless and
unnatural conventions as this that make us so impatient of what we call
family feeling. Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family
needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it
that could not be amputated with advantage.