Page:Our Grandfather by Vítězslav Hálek (1887).pdf/66



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 recognise that he was already in very truth too greyheaded to teach himself new views and new maxims. And so sometimes he reminded Terinka as if involuntarily of his grey hairs. But that scarcely availed him much. Terinka told him flatly that his grey hairs and the grey dog Vorjech, were one as dear to her as the other.

Here grandfather no longer smiled; tears trickled down his old face, and though his foot began somewhat to pain him, yet he hobbled out of the living room, across the threshold, to the farm-yard, and there retired under the old lindens, where he sat himself down on a bench. The starlings piped in their nests, and grandfather looked towards his house and reflected on all that he had enjoyed and suffered there.