BUDDENBROOKS
Hagenströms; to console himself with Kai and Herr Pfühl and his music.
The Broad Street Buddenbrooks and Aunt Clothilde, directly they saw him again, asked him how he liked school after the holidays. They asked it teasingly, with that curiously superior and slighting air which grown people assume toward children, as if none of their affairs could possibly be worthy of serious consideration; but Hanno was proof against their questions.
Three or four days after the home-coming, Dr. Langhals, the family physician, appeared in Fishers’ Lane to observe the results of the cure. He had a long consultation with the Frau Senator, and then Hanno was summoned and put, half undressed, through a long examination of his “status praesens,” as Dr. Langhals called it, looking at his fingernails. He tested Hanno’s heart action and measured his chest and his lamentable muscular development. He inquired particularly after all his functions, and lastly, with a hypodermic syringe, took a drop of blood from Hanno’s slender arm to be tested at home. He seemed, in general, not very well satisfied.
“We’ve got rather brown,” he said, putting his arm around Hanno as he stood before him. He arranged his small black-felled hand upon the boy’s shoulder, and looked up at the Frau Senator and Ida Jungmann. “But we still look very down in the mouth.”
“He is homesick for the sea,” said Gerda Buddenbrook.
“Oh, so you like being there?” asked Dr. Langhals, looking with his shallow eyes into Hanno’s face. Hanno coloured. What did Dr. Langhals mean by his question, to which he plainly expected an answer? A fantastic hope rose up in him, inspired by the belief that nothing was impossible to God—despite all the worsted-coated men there were in the world.
“Yes,” he brought out, with his wide eyes full upon Dr. Langhals’ face. But after all, it seemed, the physician had
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