“I think so,” he said. “Your serious and important business evidently concerns an advance on the Pöppenrade harvest--if I am not mistaken. But you have come to the wrong man, I think, you and your friends. In the first place, I have never done any business with Herr von Maiboom, and this would be a rather strange way to begin. In the second place--though, in the past, Grandfather, Father, and I myself have made advances on occasion to the landed gentry, it was always when they offered a certain security, either personally or through their connections. But to judge from the way you have just characterized Herr von Maiboom and his prospects, I should say there can be no security in his case.” “You are mistaken, Tom. I have let you have your say, but you are mistaken. It is not a question of an advance, at all. Maiboom has to have thirty-five thousand marks current--” “Heavens and earth!” “--five-and-thirty thousand marks current, to be paid within two weeks. The knife is at his throat--to be plain, he has to sell at once, immediately.” “In the blade--oh, the poor chap!” The Senator shook his head as he stood, playing with his pince-nez on the table-cloth. “That is a rather unheard-of thing for our sort of business,” he went on. “I have heard of such things, mostly in Hesse, where a few of the landed gentry are in the hands of the Jews. Who knows what sort of cut-throat it is that has poor Herr von Maiboom in his clutches?” “Jews? Cut-throats?” cried Frau Permaneder, astonished beyond measure. “But it’s _you_ we are talking about, Tom!” Thomas Buddenbrook suddenly threw down his pince-nez on the table so that it slid along on top of the newspaper, and turned toward his sister with a jerk. “Me?” he said, but only with his lips, for he made no sound. Then he added aloud: “Go to bed, Tony. You are tired out.” “Why, Tom, that is what Ida Jungmann used to say to us, when we were just beginning to have a good time. But I assure you I was never wider awake in my life than now, coming over here in the dead of night to make Armgard’s offer to you--or rather, indirectly, Ralf von Maiboom’s--” “And I will forgive you for making a proposal which is the product of your naïveté and the Maibooms’ helplessness.” “Helplessness? Naïveté, Thomas? I don’t understand you--I am very far from understanding you. You are offered an opportunity to do a good deed, and at the same time the best stroke of business you ever did in your life--” “Oh, my darling child, you are talking the sheerest nonsense,” cried the Senator, throwing himself back impatiently in his chair. “I beg your pardon, but you make me angry with your ridiculous innocence. Can’t you understand that you are asking me to do something discreditable, to engage in underhand manœuvres? Why should I go fishing in troubled waters? Why should I fleece this poor land-owner? Why should I take advantage of his necessity to do him out of a year’s harvest at a usurious profit to myself?”