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 loose women, drank to excess, dabbled in drugs, and at fifty suddenly collapsed in the street and was carried off to a hospital. Life, indeed, certainly so far as the raising of children was concerned, appeared to be a vicious circle. My father passed a good many of his early years in communion with the philosophers, a pernicious habit in which, two decades later, I futilely followed him. They taught him nothing. At the end of this period, however, through a long process of reasoning which I shall not detail to you, he became convinced that parents, through the very personal nature of their interest, were entirely unfitted to bring up their own children. Shortly after he had arrived at this radical conclusion he invented his extraordinary plan which offered the further advantage of removing any possibility of argument in regard to the religious faith in which his children were to be reared. When the plan was broached to my mother she immediately consented to its adoption. This agreement was reached when my eldest sister Dagmar was two years old.

Three years later, when Dagmar was five, an age at which she could walk and talk and think and was about to begin her quest of worldly knowledge, my father gave her in charge to a sterile couple who had long desired to possess a child. These foster-parents were only selected after a great deal of preliminary study—many excellent offers were rejected. The investigations, however, were conducted