Love Among the Lions: A Matrimonial Experience

She was astonishingly lovely; her Spanish descent was apparent in her magnificent black tresses, lustrous eyes, and oval face of olive tinted with richest carmine. As Theodore afterwards learnt, she was the daughter of a Spanish Government official of an ancient Castilian family, who had left his widow in such straitened circumstances that she was compelled to support herself by exhibiting performing mice and canaries at juvenile parties, until she met and married the Professor, who at that time was delivering recitations illustrated by an oxy-hydrogen lantern. The second marriage had not been altogether a success, and, now that the Professor was a widower, Theodore fancies that his relations with his imperious stepdaughter were not invariably of the most cordial nature, and that he would have been grateful to any one who succeeded in winning her hand and freeing him from her sway.