woman in the world, and he named Terinka his Flower of Paradise, which he had long been seeking for his house.
“Yes,” he cried, “she is our happiness, and our ornament, in whom we all grow young again.”
And Terinka was indeed a Flower of Paradise. She expanded in all directions, every place was full of her. Every one was made to feel her influence.
Already she had not space enough in the rooms which were originally allotted to her, and she expanded even into the living-room, which grandfather had reserved for himself and grandmother.
Grandfather did, indeed, always, and in everything, give way to her only that she might be content, and he told her that she had only to order what she pleased, and that all her orders must be carried out.
So Terinka began to give her orders in earnest. Once she declared to Uncle John, in the presence of grandfather and grandmother, that “old gran” disgusted her because she had always to be looking at his diseased foot, and she suggested that it would be better if he were banished out of the living-room.
This fell like a thunderbolt.
But grandfather laughed it off, for he supposed it was only jest, though, on second thoughts, it occurred to him that it was a curious mode of jesting.
Grandmother stood aghast, and Uncle John said nothing.
He always heard from grandfather a hundred times a day that everything which Terinka ordered must be carried out—that Flower of Paradise.
CHAPTER V
GRANDFATHER, however, learned very soon what he had praised to the skies: he experienced very soon what is the character of these Flowers of Paradise, and learned by many an unpleasant surprise what it is to carry out the commands of a daughter-in-law.
Old people are slow to adapt themselves to new ideas. What they have once got into their heads is only abandoned by a difficult process, and grandfather had so thoroughly got it into his head that he had provided his home with an excellent mistress as to recognize that he was already in very truth too grey-headed
