Tony looked a long time at her name and at the blank space next it. Then, suddenly, with a jerk, with a nervous, feverish accompaniment of sobbing breaths and quick-moving lips—she clutched the pen, plunged it rather than dipped it into the ink, and wrote, with her forefinger crooked, her hot head bent far over on her shoulder, in her awkward handwriting that climbed up the page from left to right: “Betrothed, on Sept. 22, 1845, to Herr Bendix Grünlich, Merchant, of Hamburg.”
CHAPTER XIV
“I entirely agree with you, my good friend. This important matter must be settled. In short, then: the usual dowry of a young girl of our family is seventy thousand marks.”
Herr Grünlich cast at his future father-in-law a shrewd, calculating glance—the glance of the genuine man of business.
“As a matter of fact,” he said—and this “matter of fact” was of precisely the same length as his left-hand whisker, which he was drawing reflectively through his fingers; he let go of the end just as “of fact” was finished.
“You know, my honoured father,” he began again, “the deep respect I have for traditions and principles. Only—in the present case is not this consideration for the tradition a little exaggerated? A business increases—a family prospers—in short, conditions change and improve.”
“My good friend,” said the Consul, “you see in me a fair-dealing merchant. You have not let me finish, or you would have heard that I am ready and willing to meet you in the circumstances, and add ten thousand marks to the seventy thousand without more ado.”
“Eighty thousand, then,” said Herr Grünlich, making motions with his mouth, as though to say: “Not too much; but it will do.”
Thus they came to an affectionate settlement; the Consul jingled his keys like a man satisfied as he got up. And, in fact, his satisfaction was justified; for it was only with the eighty thousand marks that they had arrived at the dowry traditional in the family.
Herr Grünlich now said good-bye and departed for Hamburg. Tony as yet realized but little of her new estate. She still went to dances at the Möllendorpfs’, Kistenmakers’, and Langhals’, and in her own home; she skated on the Burgfield and the meadows of the Trave, and permitted the attentions of the young gentlemen of the town. In the middle of October she went to the betrothal feast at the Möllendorpfs’ for the oldest son of the house and Juliet Hagenström. “Tom,” she said, “I won’t go. It is disgusting.” But she went, and enjoyed herself hugely. And, as for the rest, by the entry with the pen in the family history-book, she had won the privilege of going, with the Frau Consul or alone, into all the shops in town and making purchases in a grand style for her trousseau. It was to be a brilliant trousseau. Two seamstresses sat all day in the breakfast-room window, sewing, embroidering monograms, and eating quantities of house-bread and green cheese.