He had come up here on a definite practical mission, to see how matters stood with his dilatory young kinsman, to “prize him loose,” as he put it to himself, and take him back home. But he was conscious that he was operating on foreign territory; and the first few minutes up here had made him suspect that he was a guest in a sphere quite foreign to him, and more instead of less self-assured than his own. His business instincts conflicted with his good breeding⁠—the more keenly the more he was aware of the self-confident poise of the institutional life.

All this Hans Castorp had realized when he replied to the Consul’s wire with an inward “Don’t mention it!” But we must not suppose that he consciously practised on his uncle with the strange properties of the place. He had been too long a part of it; it was not he who wielded them against the aggressor, but they him. Everything⁠—from the moment when an emanation from his nephew had first whispered to the Consul that his undertaking had small chance of success⁠—everything about the situation fulfilled itself, simply, inevitably, up to the end, and Hans Castorp accompanied the process with his melancholy, fatalistic smile.