His whiskers were freshly curled, and at this early hour his rosy face was rosier than ever. He sat with his back to the salon, already arrayed in a black coat and light trousers with a pattern of large checks, eating a grilled chop, in the English manner. His wife thought this very elegant, but also very disgusting--she had never brought herself to take it instead of her usual breakfast of bread and butter and an egg. Tony was in her dressing-gown. She adored dressing-gowns. Nothing seemed more elegant to her than a handsome negligée, and as she had not been allowed to indulge this passion in the parental house she was the more given to it as a wife. She had three of these dainty clinging garments, to the fashioning of which can go so much more taste and fantasy than to a ball-gown. To-day she wore her dark-red one. Its colour toned beautifully with the paper above the wainscoting, and its large-flowered stuff, of a beautiful soft texture, was embroidered all over with sprays of tiny glass beads of the same colour, while row after row of red velvet ribbons ran from neck to hem. Her thick ash-blonde hair, with its dark-red velvet band, curled about her brows. She had now, as she was herself well aware, reached the highest point of her physical bloom; yet her pretty, pouting upper lip retained just the naïve, provocative expression of her childhood. The lids of her grey-blue eyes were reddened with cold water. Her hands, the white Buddenbrook hands, finely shaped if a little stumpy, their delicate wrists caressed by the velvet cuffs of her dressing-gown, handled her knife and fork and tea-cup with motions that were to-day, for some reason or other, rather jerky and abrupt. Her little daughter Erica sat near her in a high chair. She was a plump child with short blonde hair, in a funny, shapeless, knitted frock of pale-blue wool. She held a large cup in both tiny hands, entirely concealing her face, and drank her milk with little sighs of satisfaction. Frau Grünlich rang, and Tinka, the housemaid, came from the entry to take the child from her high chair and carry her upstairs into the play-room. “You may take her walking outside for a half-hour, Tinka,” said Tony. “But not longer; and put on her thick jacket. It is very damp and foggy.” She remained alone with her husband. “You only make yourself seem absurd,” she said then, after a silence, obviously continuing an interrupted conversation. “What are your objections? Give me some reason. I can’t be always attending to the child.” “You are not fond of children, Antonie.” “Fond of children, indeed! I have no time. I am taken up with the housekeeping. I wake up with twenty things that must be done, and I go to bed with forty that have not been done.” “There are two servants. A young woman like you--”