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.