Month 11: Pages 17-18

This Week's Installment

As always, the italicized parts are what I'm unsure of.

How very kindly, yes, with what admiration and love had Fritz spoken of him!  And he?  He took the first real opportunity to lower the younger brother in her eyes.
     “I believe your judgement about your brother is not totally fair.  In the foundation of his nature Fritz is serious, almost too serious.  That he ventures a funny horseman trick and can also be happy in the happy circle doesn’t make him worse for me.  I do not love the person who can not once laugh from the heart.”
     “And do you count me among them?”
     “I have not the pleasure to know you so well in order to allow myself an opinion about you.”
     She said it in that cold, dismissive manner that, for her, was always required when she felt herself offended.
     “But your word suits me since you have rightly said:  such laughing from the heart, as you yourself expressed, I have never been able to do - not from my childhood on.  And no one has felt that so heavily as I myself.”
     A faint stroke of sympathy flitted over her face.  He did not want it, one could tell it annoyed him, 

---17--- 

that it was not accepted by him.  A more self-conscious tone came into their conversation.
     “That your brother, now arrived at a sure highpoint of his career, has the bravery to break from it,” said Edith after a short pause, “and build up a totally new life for himself through his own strength surely also speaks for the earnestness of his view.”
     “No, no!” he butted in with suddenly-awakened liveliness, “that isn’t it.  At least not that alone.  It’s something else - the same as with me.  However different we also usually find our philosophy of life, we find something of a shock in it.”
     “And what would this other be?”
     A faint glow had entered his face.  It didn’t color it red, but it gave it a hint of warmth that it didn’t possess up until then.  “You see, I have gone a long way around the world and have gotten to know many people and countries.

Interesting Words I Ran Across

• das Manko - deficiency, shortage; deficit, shortfall [This is an-other word that makes me wish my German/English dictionary had etymologies because it seems to come from the Romance Languages.  In French, there's the noun le manque (lack, want; deficiency, shortage) and the verb manquer (to be absent; to be missing), and in Italian, there's the verb mancare (to be missing)

I had to look up a different sense of Zug (I was familiar with train, but that didn't fit the context), and I found a lot of idioms with "train" in them:

• in den letzten Zügen liegen - be breathing one's last; be on its last legs [literally: to lay in the last train]
• dem Zug seines Herzens folgen - follow (the dictates of) one's heart [literally: to follow the train of his heart]
• Zug um Zug - step by step [literally: train by train]

Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary

A relative clause has "zu Gebote," which I've translated as "required," although it's literally more like "to requirements."  So, "die ihr immer zu Gebote war" becomes "that, for her, was always required."  I'm pretty sure it provides the same meaning, but the grammar is different; there's a passive voice verb instead of a plural noun in a prepositional phrase.

Ihr can be either a third person singular (feminine) possessive pronoun or a third person plural possessive pronoun, so "Ein befangenerer Ton kam in ihre Unterhaltung" could be translated as either "A more self-conscious tone came into her conversation" or "A more self-conscious tone came into their conversation."  Since this sentence takes place right after Hans Warsow was speaking, he seems to have some involvement in the conversation's turning to "a more self-conscious tone," so I translated it as "their conversation."