CHAPTER VII
“You don’t even ask me? You go right over my head?”
“I have done as I had to do.”
“You have acted like a distracted person, in a perfectly unreasonable way.”
“Reason is not the highest thing on earth.”
“Please don’t make phrases. The question is one of the most ordinary justice, which you have most astonishingly ignored.”
“Let me suggest to you, my son, that you yourself are ignoring the duty and respect which you owe to your mother.”
“And I answer you, my dear Mother, by telling you that I have never for a moment forgotten the respect I owe you; but that my attributes as a son became void when I took my father’s place as head of the family and of the firm.”
“I desire you to be silent, Thomas!”
“No, I will not be silent, so long as you fail to realize the extent of your own weakness and folly.”
“I have a right to dispose of my own property as I choose!”
“Within the limits of justice and reason.”
“I could never have believed you would have the heart to wound me like this!”
“And I could never have believed that my own Mother would slap me in the face!”
“Tom! Why, Tom!” Frau Permaneder’s anguished voice got itself a hearing at last. She sat at the window of the landscape-room, wringing her hands, while her brother paced up and down in a state of high excitement, and the Frau Consul, beside herself with angry grief, sat on the sofa, leaning with one hand on its upholstered arm, while the other struck
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