He finished with Joachim, thrust his stethoscope in the pocket of his smock, and rubbed his eyes with both huge hands, as was his habit when he had “backslidden” and become melancholy. Half mechanically, between yawns, he reeled off his patter: “Well, Ziemssen, just keep your pecker up, you’ll be all right yet. You aren’t like a picture in a physiology-book, there’s a hitch here and there, and you haven’t cleaned up your Gaffky, you’ve even gone up a peg or so, it’s six this time⁠—but never mind, don’t pull a long face, you are better than you were when you came, I can hand it to you in writing. Just another five or six months⁠— monaths , I mean. Did you know that is the earlier form of the word? I mean to say monath , after this⁠—”

“Herr Hofrat,” Joachim began. He stood bare to the waist, heels together and chest out, with a determined bearing, and as mottled in the face as ever he had been that time when Hans Castorp first made observations on the pallor of the deeply tanned.