The Tiger's Bride

I will try to summarise this, but I think I might fall short. It started off making some sense, but when the beast is the tiger-man that the girl's old English nurse told her about, I came to the conclusion that Carter was on acid when she wrote this.

A gambling fellow from Russia travels to Italy to play poker, and bets his daughter, losing her to a tiger-man. The tiger-man, however, wears a human mask, but he's blatantly not human. There's some ambiguity as to what he looks like, but I'm imagining Tony the Tiger in a V for Vendetta mask, and a luxurious velvet purple robe, and a pimp cane. He tries to strike a deal, using his valet as an intermediary communicator (presumably because he can only actually growl "It's grrrrrrrreat" in response to breakfast cereal) whereby the girl gets naked in exchange for her freedom and her father's restored prosperity. She gets a bit snarky at this request, and mumbles something about locking her in a room, and creates all these stipulations about when, how and where she might get naked for him, apparently to shame him. He cries a wee bit, and she acts like a bit of a smug bitch. Then the valet produces a robotic maid for her, since there are no humans allowed in the beast's house. It does her makeup.

Following this, they go riding on horseback, and the beast gets naked. It becomes apparent that he's a tiger. Therefore, the only reasonable response to him being a tiger-man-thing is for the girl to get naked too. Then they go back, and the girl is free to leave, but the valet turns into some kind of tiger. Before she leaves, she visits the beast one last time, and he's gone feral, pissing all over the place and knocking over pots and stuff. Then I think she turns into a tiger too, but it wasn't that clear.

I reiterate, I didn't actually understand this story. Too many tigers.