life has taught me. But let it go, Tom. I won’t urge you. Don’t imagine that I think I could persuade you—I know I don’t know enough. I’m only a silly female. It’s a pity. Well, never mind.—It interested me very much. On the one hand I was shocked and upset about the Maibooms, but on the other I was pleased for you. I said to myself: ‘Tom has been going about lately feeling very down in the mouth. He used to complain, but now he does not even complain any more. He has been losing money, and times are poor—and all that just now, when God has been good to me, and I am feeling happier than I have for a long time.’ So I thought, ‘This would be something for him: a stroke of luck, a good coup. It would offset a good deal of misfortune, and show people that luck is still on the side of the firm of Johann Buddenbrook.’ And if you had undertaken it, I should have been so proud to have been the means—for you know it has always been my dream and my one desire, to be of some good to the family name.—Well, never mind. It is settled now. What I feel vexed about is that Maiboom has to sell, in any case, and if he looks around in the town here, he will find a purchaser—and it will be that rascal Hermann Hagenström!”
“Oh, yes—he probably would not refuse it,” the Senator said bitterly; and Frau Permaneder answered, three times, one after the other: “You see, you see, you see!”
Thomas Buddenbrook suddenly began to shake his head and laugh angrily.
“We are silly. We sit here and work ourselves up—at least, you do—over something that is neither here nor there. So far as I know, I have not even asked what the thing is about—what Herr von Maiboom actually has to sell. I do not know Pöppenrade.”
“Oh, you would have had to go there,” she said eagerly. “It’s not far from here to Rostock—and from there it is no distance at all. And as for what he has to sell—Pöppenrade is a large estate, I know for a fact that it grows more than
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