The sense of poetry escaped you, though you were brave enough to love and marry against the will of your father. And you had no ambition. Uncle Gotthold. The old name is only a burgher name, it is true, and one cherishes it by making the grain business flourish, and oneself beloved and powerful in a little corner of the earth. Did you think: ‘I will marry her whom I love, and pay no attention to practical considerations, for they are petty and provincial?’ Oh, we are travelled and educated enough to realize that the limits set to our ambition are small and petty enough, looked at from outside and above. But everything in this world is comparative, Uncle Gotthold. Did you know one can be a great man, even in a small place; a Cæsar even in a little commercial town on the Baltic? But that takes imagination and idealism—and you didn’t have it, whatever you may have thought yourself.”
Thomas Buddenbrook turned away. He went to the window and looked out at the dim grey gothic façade of the Town Hall opposite, shrouded in rain. He had his hands behind his back and a smile on his intelligent face.
The office and title of the Royal Consulate of the Netherlands, which Thomas Buddenbrook might have taken after his father’s death, went back to him now, to the boundless satisfaction of Tony Grünlich; and the curving shield with the lions, the arms, and the crown was once more to be seen on the gabled front of the house in Meng Street, under the “Dominus providebit.”
Soon after this was accomplished, in June of the same year, the young Consul set out to Amsterdam on a business journey the duration of which he did not know.
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