If you are talking about "The Unseemly Old Lady" by Bertolt Brecht the English translation of the paragraph in question reads: "Shortly after this, my father made a business trip in the neighbourhood and he visited his mother. She was just about to go out when he turned up. She took off her hat again and gave him a glass of red wine and a biscuit. She seemed in a perfectly equable mood, neither particularly animated nor particularly silent. She asked after us, though not in much detail, and wanted principally to know whether there were cherries for the children. There she was quite her old self. The room was of course scrupulously clean and she looked well." ( https://books.google.de/books?id=m3keBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA250 )

The sentence as it is makes no sense. There's the expression "im Begriffe etwas zu tun" (about to do s.th.). Could you give the complete sentence, and, if necessary, context?