“Now, Tony dear! Have a little self-control, a little dignity, I beg of you. You are not usually lacking in dignity. Am I going around like Henning Kurz? We amount to something even without the ‘Senator.’ And I hope you won’t die, whichever way it turns out!” And the agitations, the consultations, the struggles of opinion took their course. Consul Peter Döhlmann, the rake with a business now entirely ruined, which existed only in name, and the twenty-seven-year-old daughter whose inheritance he was eating up, played his part by attending two dinners, one given by Thomas Buddenbrook and the other by Herman Hagenström, and both times addressing his host, in his loud, resounding voice, as “Senator.” But Siegismund Gosch, old Gosch the broker, went about like a raging lion, and engaged to throttle anybody, out of hand, who wasn’t minded to vote for Consul Buddenbrook. “Consul Buddenbrook, gentlemen--ah, there’s a man for you! I stood at his father’s side in the ’48, when, with a word, he tamed the unleashed fury of the mob. His father, and his father’s father before him, would have been Senator were there any justice on this earth!” But at bottom it was not so much Consul Buddenbrook himself whose personality fired Gosch’s soul to its innermost depths. It was rather the young Frau Consul, Gerda Arnoldsen. Not that the broker had ever exchanged a word with her. He did not belong to her circle of wealthy merchant families, nor sit at their tables, nor pay visits to them. But, as we have seen, Gerda Buddenbrook had but to arrive in the town to be singled out by the roving fancy of the sinister broker, ever on the look-out for the unusual. With unerring instinct he divined that this figure was calculated to add content to his unsatisfied existence, and he made himself the slave of one who had scarcely ever heard his name. Since then he encompassed in his reveries this nervous, exceedingly reserved lady, to whom he had not even been presented: he lifted his Jesuit hat to her, on the street, to her great surprise, and treated her to a pantomime of cringing treachery, gloating over her the while in his thoughts as a tiger might over his trainer. This dull existence would afford him no chance of committing atrocities for this woman’s sake--ah, if it only would, with what devilish indifference would he answer for them! Its stupid conventions prevented him from raising her, by deeds of blood and horror, to an imperial throne!--And thus, nothing was left but for him to go to the Town Hall and cast his vote in favour of her furiously respected husband--and, perhaps, one day, to dedicate to her his forthcoming transition of Lope de Vega. CHAPTER IV Every vacant seat in the Senate must, according to the Constitution, be filled within four weeks. Three of them have passed, and this is election-day--a day of thaw, at the end of February.