Of an evening, he would strum the songs of his native land upon a beribboned mandolin; or talk about his sugar-beet plantation, and the pretty girls who worked it. On Hans Castorp’s either side sat the wedded pair from Halle, Magnus the brewer and his wife, about whom melancholy hung as a cloud, because they had no tolerance for certain important products of metabolism: he sugar, she albumen. Their spirits, particularly the sallow Frau Magnus’s, were proof against any ray of cheer; forlornity exhaled from her like damp from a cellar; even more than Frau Stöhr she represented that unedifying union of dullness and disease, which had offended Hans Castorp’s soul⁠—under correction from Herr Settembrini. Herr Magnus was livelier and chattier, though only in a vein intolerable to the Italian’s literary sense. He was inclined to choler too, and often clashed with Herr Wenzel on political and other grounds. The nationalistic aspirations of the Czech exasperated him; again, the latter declared himself in favour of prohibition, and made moral remarks about the brewing industry, while Herr Magnus, very red in the face, defended from the hygienic viewpoint the unexceptionableness of the drink with which his interests were bound up.