“I’m done,” Christian said. He let himself down sidewise on one of the high-backed chairs around the dining-table, and held his hat and stick between his thin knees. “May I ask what it is you are done with, and what brings you to me?” said the Consul. He remained standing. “I’m done,” repeated Christian, shaking his head from side to side with frightful earnestness and letting his little round eyes stray restlessly back and forth. He was now thirty-three years old, but he looked much older. His reddish-blond hair was grown so thin that nearly all the cranium was bare. His cheeks were sunken, the cheek-bones protruded sharply, and between them, naked, fleshless, and gaunt, stood the huge hooked nose. “If it were only this--!” he went on, and ran his hand down the whole of his left side, very close, but not touching it. “It isn’t a pain, you know--it is a misery, a continuous, indefinite ache. Dr. Drögemuller in Hamburg tells me that my nerves on this side are all too short. Imagine, on my whole left side, my nerves aren’t long enough! Sometimes I think I shall surely have a stroke here, on this side, a permanent paralysis. You have no idea. I never go to sleep properly. My heart doesn’t beat, and I start up suddenly, in a perfectly terrible fright. That happens not once but ten times before I get to sleep. I don’t know if you know what it is. I’ll tell you about it more precisely. It is--” “Not now,” the Consul said coldly. “Am I to understand that you have come here to tell me this? I suppose not.” “No, Thomas. If it were only that--but it is not that--alone. It is the business. I can’t go on with it.” “Your affairs are in confusion again?” The Consul did not start, he did not raise his voice. He asked the question quite calmly, and looked sidewise at his brother, with a cold, weary glance. “No, Thomas. For to tell you the truth--it is all the same now--I never really was in order, even with the ten thousand, as you know yourself. They only saved me from putting up the shutters at once. The thing is--I had more losses at once, in coffee--and with the failure in Antwerp-- That’s the truth. So then I didn’t do any more business; I just sat still. But one has to live--so now there are notes and other debts--five thousand thaler. You don’t know the hole I’m in. And on top of everything else, this agony--” “Oh, so you just sat still, did you?” cried the Consul, beside himself. His self-control was gone now. “You let the wagon stick in the mud and went off to enjoy yourself! You think I don’t know the kind of life you’ve been living--theatres and circus and clubs--and women--” “You mean Aline. Yes, Thomas, you have very little understanding for that sort of thing, and it’s my misfortune, perhaps, that I have so much. You are right when you say it has cost me too much; and it will cost me a goodish bit more, for--I’ll tell you something, just here between two brothers--the third child, the little girl, six months old, she is my child.”