It's no good in _looking_ an old fogey, if you aren't one; it's no earthly use,"-- standing before a glass and ruefully examining his countenance--"in looking fifty, if you are only thirty-four.

It will be a scandal," says the professor mournfully.

"They'll cut _her_, and they'll cut me, and--what the _deuce_ did Wynter mean by leaving me his daughter?
A real live girl of seventeen! It'll be the death of me," says the professor, mopping his brow.
"What"-- wrathfully--"that determined spendthrift meant, by flinging his family on _my_ shoulders, I---- Oh! _Poor_ old Wynter!" Here he grows remorseful again.

Abuse a man dead and gone, and one, too, who had been good to him in many ways when he, the professor, was younger than he is now, and had just quarrelled with a father who was only too prone to quarrel with anyone who gave him the chance, seems but a poor thing.

The professor's quarrel with his father had been caused by the young man's refusal to accept a Government appointment--obtained with some difficulty--for the very insufficient and, as it seemed to his father, iniquitous reason, that he had made up his mind to devote his life to science.