Page:Buddenbrooks vol 1 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0001mann).pdf/375

RV 363 (BUDDENBROOKS) Jungmann on the eve of her betrothal&mdash;that he would so completely fail to recognize the duties he had taken upon himself when he married a Buddenbrook&mdash;that she had never dreamed.

But these feelings must be overcome; and her family at home saw from her letters how she resigned herself. She lived on rather monotonously with her husband and Erica, who went to school; she attended to her housekeeping, kept up friendly relations with the people who rented the parterre and the first storey and with the Niederpaur family in Marienplatz; and she wrote now and then of going to the theatre with her friend Eva. Herr Permaneder did not care for the theatre. And it came out that he had grown to more than forty years of age in his beloved Munich without ever having seen the inside of the Pinakothek.

Time passed. But Tony could feel no longer any true happiness in her new life, since the day when Herr Permaneder received her dowry and settled himself down to enjoy his ease. Hope was no more. She would never be able to write home to announce new ventures and new successes. Just as life was now&mdash;free from cares, it was true, but so limited, so lamentably “unrefined,”&mdash;just so it would remain until the end. It weighed upon her. It was plain from her letters that this very lowness of tone was making it harder for her to adapt herself to the south-German surroundings. In small matters, of course, things grew easier. She learned to make herself understood by the servants and errand-boys, to say “meaties” instead of “croquettes,” and to set no more fruit soup before her husband after the one he had called a “sickening mess.” But, in general, she remained a stranger in her new home; and she never ceased to taste the bitterness of the knowledge that to be a born Buddenbrook was not to enjoy any particular prestige in her adopted home. She once related in a letter the story of how she met in the street a mason’s apprentice, carrying a mug of beer in one hand and holding a large white radish by its tail in the other; who, waving his beer, said jovially: “Neighbour, can ye tell us the time?”

RV 363 (363)