He had lately taken to himself a wife, his junior by a score of years.
The academic atmosphere had not had time then to freeze her into the
dignity befitting her position; when I met her ten years later, she was
steady and staid enough, poor thing, to have been the wife of Grotius.

Guy sat next to her that evening, and before the first course was over a
decided flirtation was established. The pretty hostess, albeit wife of a
doctor and daughter of a dean, had evidently a strong coquettish element
in her composition, and a very slight spark was sufficient to relight
the _veteris vestigia flammæ._

For some time her husband did not seem to realize the position; but
gradually his sentences grew rare and curt; he opened his mouth, no
longer to let fall the pearls of his wisdom, but to stop it with savory
meat; finally this last resource failed, and he sat, looking wrathfully
but helplessly on the proceedings at the other end of the table--a
lamentable instance of prostrated ecclesiastical dignity. His disgust,
however, was far exceeded by the horror of one of the party, a meek,
cadaverous-looking boy, whose parents lived in the town, and who was
wont to regard the head master as the vicegerent of all powers, civil
and sacerdotal--I am not sure he did not include military as well. I
caught him looking several times at the door and the ceiling with a
pale, guilty face, as if he expected some immediate visitation to punish
the sacrilege. However, heaven, which did not interrupt the feast of
Atreus or of Tereus (till the dessert), allowed us to finish our dinner
in peace. During the interval when we sat alone over his claret, our
host revived a little; but utterly relapsed in the drawing-room, where
things went on worse than ever. Guy leaned over the fair Penelope (such
was her classical and not inappropriate name) while she was singing, and