The marriage of which little Johann had been the issue had never lost charm in the town as a subject for conversation. Since both of the parties to it were still felt to have something queer about them, the union itself must partake of that character of the strange and uncanny which they each possessed. To get behind it even a little, to look beneath the scanty outward facts to the bottom of this relation, seemed a difficult, but certainly a stimulating task. And in bedrooms and sitting-rooms, in clubs and casinos, yes, even on ’Change itself, people still talked about Gerda and Thomas Buddenbrook. How had these two come to marry, and what sort of relationship was theirs? Everybody remembered the sudden resolve of Thomas Buddenbrook eighteen years ago, when he was thirty years old. “This one or no one,” he had said. It must have been something of the same sort with Gerda, for it was well known that she had refused everybody up to her twenty-seventh year, and then forthwith lent an ear to this particular wooer. It must have been a love match, people said: they granted that the three hundred thousand thaler had probably not played much of a rôle. But of that which any ordinary person would call love, there was very little to be seen between the pair. They had displayed from the very beginning a correct, respectful politeness, quite extraordinary between husband and wife. And what was still more odd it seemed not to proceed out of any inner estrangement, but out of a peculiar, silent, deep mutual knowledge. This had not at all altered with the years. The one change due to the passage of time was an outward one. It was only this: that the difference in years began to make itself plainly visible. When you saw them together you felt that here was a rapidly aging man, already a little heavy, with his young wife at his side. Thomas Buddenbrook was going off very much, and this despite the now almost laughable vanity by which he kept himself up. On the other hand, Gerda had scarcely altered in these eighteen years. She seemed to be, as it were, conserved in the nervous coldness which was the essence of her being. Her lovely dark-red hair had kept its colour, the white skin its smooth texture, the figure its lofty aristocratic slimness. In the corners of her rather too small and close-set brown eyes were the same blue shadows. You could not trust those eyes. Their look was strange, and what was written in it impossible to decipher. This woman’s personality was so cool, so reserved, so repressed, so distant, she showed so little human warmth for anything but her music--how could one help feeling a vague mistrust? People unearthed wise old saws on the subject of human nature and applied them to Senator Buddenbrook’s wife. Still waters were known to run deep. Some people were slyer than foxes. And as they searched for an explanation, their limited imaginations soon led them to the theory that the lovely Gerda was deceiving her aging husband.