Three generations of women--grandmother, mother, and daughter--lived there, without a single man to take care of them, attended only by an old widowed cook and her daughter, who had grown up into the position of a waiting maid.

A dreamy, monotonous life they lived here, like that of the sleepers in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty behind their hundred-year-old hedge of thorns.
The grandmother was the head of the house--Frau Brohl, a lady of over sixty years, and a widow for the last twenty.

She was a small thin woman, her figure very much bent, with snow-white hair, a narrow, pale face, and pretty brown eyes.

She moved slowly and with great exertion, spoke softly and with shortness of breath, and seemed weary and sad.
She looked as if she had some hidden sickness, and as if her feeble lamp of life might soon flicker out.

As a matter of fact she had never had a day's illness; her appearance gave the impression of weakness, and increasing age made her neither better nor worse.