“Yes, Tom, over the desk in your office,” answered Frau Permaneder, and embraced her brother. Then she drew him into the bow-window and pointed. Under a deep blue sky, the two-coloured flag floated above all the houses, right down Fishers’ Lane, from Broad Street to the wharf, where the “Wullenwewer” and the “Friederike Överdieck” lay under full flag, in their owner’s honour. “The whole town is the same,” said Frau Permaneder, and her voice trembled. “I’ve been out and about already. Even the Hagenströms have a flag. They couldn’t do otherwise.--I’d smash in their window!” He smiled, and they went back to the table together. “And here are the telegrams, Tom, the first ones to come--the personal ones, of course; the others have been sent to the office.” They opened a few of the dispatches: from the family in Hamburg, from the Frankfort Buddenbrooks, from Herr Arnoldsen in Amsterdam, from Jürgen Kröger in Wismar. Suddenly Frau Permaneder flushed deeply. “He is a good man, in his way,” she said, and pushed across to her brother the telegram she had just opened: it was signed Permaneder. “But time is passing,” said the Senator, and looked at his watch. “I’d like my tea. Will you come in with me? The house will be like a bee-hive after a while.” His wife, who had given a sign to Ida Jungmann, held him back. “Just a moment, Thomas. You know Hanno has to go to his lessons. He wants to say a poem to you first. Come here, Hanno. And now, just as if no one else were here--you remember? Don’t be excited.” It was the summer holidays, of course, but little Hanno had private lessons in arithmetic, in order to keep up with his class. Somewhere out in the suburb of St. Gertrude, in a little ill-smelling room, a man in a red beard, with dirty fingernails, was waiting to discipline him in the detested “tables.” But first he was to recite to Papa a poem painfully learned by heart, with Ida Jungmann’s help, in the little balcony on the second floor. He leaned against the piano, in his blue sailor suit with the white V front and the wide linen collar with a big sailor’s knot coming out beneath. His thin legs were crossed, his body and head a little inclined in an attitude of shy, unconscious grace. Two or three weeks before, his hair had been cut, as not only his fellow-pupils, but the master as well, had laughed at it; but his head was still covered with soft abundant ringlets, growing down over the forehead and temples. His eyelids drooped, so that the long brown lashes lay over the deep blue shadows; and his closed lips were a little wry.