James Tienappel, whom Hans Castorp addressed by turns as “Uncle James” and “James,” was a long-legged man close to the forties, dressed in good English suiting and florid linen; with thinnish canary-yellow hair, blue eyes set close together, a close-clipped, straw-coloured moustache, and carefully manicured hands. He had continued to live in the old Consul’s roomy villa in Harvestehuder Way, though he had been a husband and father for some years, having taken a wife from his own social sphere, of his own highly civilized and elegant type, with the same soft, quick, pointedly polite manner of speech. In his own sphere he passed for a very energetic, cautious and⁠—despite his refined ways⁠—coldly practical man of business. But outside it⁠—when he travelled south, for instance⁠—he displayed a kind of eager pliancy, a quick and friendly readiness to step outside his own personality, which was by no means a sign of the insecurity of his own culture, but rather betrayed a conviction of its sufficiency, and a desire to correct his own aristocratic limitations; it evidenced a wish not to show surprise at new ways, even when he found them extraordinary past belief. “Certainly, of course,” he would hasten to remark, so that nobody might say of him that with all his elegance he was limited.