These carry away from the prolonged internat a sufficient supply of Latin or of mathematics; but they are lacking in two acquisitions of capital import: they have been deprived of two indispensable experiences.

On entering society the young man is ignorant of its two principal personages, man and woman, as they are and as he is about to meet them in society.

He has no idea of them, or rather he has only a preconceived, arbitrary and false conception of them .-- He has not dined, commonly, with a lady, head of the house, along with her daughters and often with other ladies; their tone of voice, their deportment at table, their toilette, their greater reserve, the attentions they receive, the air of politeness all around, have not impressed on his imagination the faintest lines of an exact notion; hence, there is something wanting in him in relation to how he should demean himself; he does not know how to address them, feels uncomfortable in their presence; they are strange beings to him, new, of an unknown species .-- In a like situation, at table in the evening, he has never heard men conversing together: he has not gathered in the thousand bits of information which a young growing mind derives from general conversation: * about careers in life, competition, business, money, the domestic fireside and expenses; * about the cost of living which should always depend on income; * about the gain which nearly always indicates the current rates of labor and of the social subjection one undergoes; * about the pressing, powerful, personal interests which are soon to seize him by the collar and perhaps by the throat; * about the constant effort required the incessant calculation, the daily struggle which, in modern society, makes up the life of an ordinary man.
All means of obtaining knowledge have been denied him, the contact with living and diverse men, the images which the sensations of his eyes and ears might have stamped on his brain.

These images constitute the sole materials of a correct, healthy conception; through them, spontaneously and gradually, without too many deceptions or shocks, he might have figured social life to himself, such as it is, its conditions, difficulties, and its opportunities: he has neither the sentiment of it nor even a premonition.

In all matters, that which we call common sense is never but an involuntary latent summary, the lasting, substantial and salutary depot left in our minds after many direct impressions.
With reference to social life, he has been deprived of all these direct impressions and the precious depot has never been formed in him .-- e He has scarcely ever conversed with his professors; their talk with him has been about impersonal and abstract matters, languages, literature and mathematics.