“Oh, no, I don’t quite intend to play the fool like that,” Hans Castorp said. Uncle James talked like a valley man. Let him stop up here a bit, look about him and get used to things, he would change his tune. The thing was to achieve an absolute cure, and to that end Behrens had just lately socked him another six months. “Are you crazy?” the uncle asked. He addressed his relative as “young man,” and asked if he was crazy. A holiday that would soon have lasted a year and a quarter, and now another half a year on top of that! Who, deuce take it, had all that time to waste? Hans Castorp laid back his head, and laughed, a quiet, brief chuckle. Time! Uncle James would have to alter his ideas about time, in the first place, before he could talk. Tienappel said he would have a serious conversation tomorrow with the Hofrat, on Hans’s affair. “By all means,” advised the nephew. “You’ll like him. An interesting character, brusque to a degree, yet melancholy.” He pointed up to the lights on the Schatzalp, and casually mentioned that they had to bring down their corpses by bobsleigh in the winter.