The family's decline is placed in sharpest focus by a series of scenes in which, with diminishing success, the head of the family has to ward off threats to family interests. These scenes, consciously linked by the narrator, involve each of the first three generations. The series begins with the rejection of Gotthold Buddenbrook's demands for money. Gotthold, Johann's son by his first marriage and therefore the Consul's half-brother, has disgraced the family's sense of social prestige by marrying a shop-keeper and wishes to add injury by claiming a share of the family's increased fortune (1,10). The Consul and his daughter Tony enact the next crisis, just before a meeting to wind up the affairs of her bankrupt husband Grünlich, in which the Consul must decide between an obligation to keep the family together and the more tangible obligation not to throw good money after bad (4,7). Next it is Thomas who tries to cope with his mother's excessive generosity in parting with Clara's inheritance rather than keeping it within the family (7,7). Shortly afterwards he confronts Tony as she suggests a questionable business proposition (8,2 – 4). Finally, in the most heated and dramatic confrontation of all, Thomas and Christian test their conflicting strengths of purpose and their obligations to the family name. The occasion for this conflict is more trivial than any that have gone before – a few soup-plates and a canteen of silver – but the conflict is in deadly earnest and its outcome of crucial importance to the conclusion of the novel.