The marriage was blessed by one daughter, who grew up to be a rather pretty, well-mannered, and well-grown girl.  Her horizon stretched from the storeroom to the linen-press, and from the flatiron to her book of songs.  She felt a high esteem for her father—­just as everyone does for a rich man—­and for her mother, if hardly love, at least a boundless respect.  She regarded her as almost more than human, and the care with which she listened to her mother’s instructions into the secrets of the kitchen, the market, and the linen-room, was almost unnatural.  She was afraid she would never attain to the fluctuations of price in the fish market in different seasons of the year, the starching of muslins, the time it took to cook a pudding, and how much sugar went to a pot of preserved fruit; and her mother destroyed the last remnant of self-confidence when half-pityingly, half-contemptuously she told her that she was not sufficiently developed to understand such things.  When Fraulein Brohl was old enough, her parents married her to Herr Marker.  It was hardly a love match, but in Brohl, Son & Company’s house such folly as love was not considered.  Herr Marker was the son of a wholesale coffee-merchant, and was neither handsome nor distinguished-looking; he was small, thin, bandy-legged, with an unwholesome complexion, a peevish expression, and almost bald-headed.

Herr F.A.  Brohl soon found that he had made a mistake, and been in too great a hurry.  The old Marker lost his fortune in an unlucky speculation during the Crimean War, and was only saved by Brohl from the shame of bankruptcy.  He died soon afterward of grief, and left his son nothing but debts.  The young Marker showed no special genius for the coffee business, but an uncomfortable ambition for speculation in stocks.  He opened an exchange office, and entered into transactions with the Exchanges of Berlin, Frankfort, and Amsterdam, and after a short time the last penny of his wife’s dowry disappeared.  His father-in-law dipped into his pockets and renewed the dowry, but stipulated that Marker in the future should ask his advice before any undertaking.  This Marker felt as a deep humiliation, and rather than submit to Brohl’s tyranny, preferred to loaf all day with his hands in his pockets at the Exchange, and shortened the evenings by going to the club, and boring people with endless stories of the meanness and thick-headedness of his cad of a father-in-law, who in his old-fashioned, narrow-minded Philistinism had not the least capacity for any great undertakings.

Brohl died soon after, and Marker experienced a new and painful sensation.  His wife did not inherit a penny by her father’s will, his whole property under limited conditions going to the widow.  This was specially arranged for by Brohl to prevent Marker from laying his hands on more capital.  He shook his fist at the opening of the will, and broke out into unseemly abuse; he went all over Stettin, and cried out that he was robbed, that the old rascal had