“Please don’t make phrases. The question is one of the most ordinary justice, which you have most astonishingly ignored.” “Let me suggest to you, my son, that you yourself are ignoring the duty and respect which you owe to your mother.” “And I answer you, my dear Mother, by telling you that I have never for a moment forgotten the respect I owe you; but that my attributes as a son became void when I took my father’s place as head of the family and of the firm.” “I desire you to be silent, Thomas!” “No, I will not be silent, so long as you fail to realize the extent of your own weakness and folly.” “I have a right to dispose of my own property as I choose!” “Within the limits of justice and reason.” “I could never have believed you would have the heart to wound me like this!” “And I could never have believed that my own Mother would slap me in the face!” “Tom! Why, Tom!” Frau Permaneder’s anguished voice got itself a hearing at last. She sat at the window of the landscape-room, wringing her hands, while her brother paced up and down in a state of high excitement, and the Frau Consul, beside herself with angry grief, sat on the sofa, leaning with one hand on its upholstered arm, while the other struck the table to emphasize her words. All three wore mourning for Clara, who was now no longer of this earth; and all three were pale and excited. What was going on? Something amazing, something dreadful, something at which the very actors in the scene themselves stood aghast and incredulous. A quarrel, an embittered disagreement between mother and son! It was a sultry August afternoon. Only ten days after the Senator had gently prepared his mother and given her the letters from Clara and Tiburtius, the blow fell, and he had the harder task of breaking to the old lady the news of death itself. He travelled to Riga for the funeral, and returned with his brother-in-law, who spent a few days with the family of his deceased wife, and also visited Christian in the hospital at Hamburg. And now, two days after the Pastor had departed for home, the Frau Consul, with obvious hesitation, made a certain revelation to her son. “One hundred and twenty-seven thousand, five hundred marks current,” cried he, and shook his clasped hands in front of him. “If it were the dowry, even! If he wanted to keep the eighty thousand marks! Though, considering there’s no heir, even that--! But to promise him Clara’s whole inheritance, right over my head! Without saying aye, yes, or no!”