“Listen, my dear child,” said the Consul, stroking her hair. “I want to ask you something very serious. Tell me: you love your husband with your whole heart, don’t you?” “Of course, Papa,” said Tony with a face of childlike hypocrisy--precisely the face of the child Tony when she was asked: “You won’t tease the old doll-woman again, Tony?” The Consul was silent a minute. “You love him so much,” he asked again, “that you could not live without him, under any circumstances, even if by God’s will your situation should alter so that he could no longer surround you with all these things?” And his hand described a quick movement over the furniture and portières, over the gilt clock on the étagère, and finally over her own frock. “Certainly, Papa,” repeated Tony, in the soothing tone she nearly always used when any one spoke seriously to her. She looked past her father out of the window, where a heavy veil of rain was silently descending. Her face had the expression children wear when some one tells them a fairy story and then tactlessly introduces a generalization about conduct and duty--a mixture of embarrassment and impatience, piety and boredom. The Consul looked at her without speaking for a minute. Was he satisfied with her response? He had weighed everything thoroughly, at home and during the journey. It is comprehensible that Johann Buddenbrook’s first impulse was to refuse his son-in-law any considerable payment. But when he remembered how pressing--to use a mild word--he had been about this marriage; when he looked back into the past, and recalled the words: “Are you satisfied with me?” with which his child had taken leave of him after the wedding, he gave way to a burdensome sense of guilt against her and said to himself that the thing must be decided according to her feelings. He knew perfectly that she had not made the marriage out of love, but he was obliged to reckon with the possibility that these four years of life together and the birth of the child had changed matters; that Tony now felt bound body and soul to her husband and would be driven by considerations both spiritual and worldly to shrink from a separation. In such a case, the Consul argued, he must accommodate himself to the surrender of whatever sum was necessary. Christian duty and wifely feeling did indeed demand that Tony should follow her husband into misfortune; and if she actually took this resolve, he did not feel justified in letting her be deprived of all the ease and comfort to which she had been accustomed since childhood. He would feel himself obliged to avert the catastrophe, and to support B. Grünlich at any price. Yet the final result of his considerations was the desire to take his daughter and her child home with him and let Grünlich go his own way. God forbid that the worst should happen!