“Funny,” Joachim said, bending forward to look at his cousin, on Herr Settembrini’s farther side. “You were saying something quite like that just lately.”

“Was I?” said Hans Castorp. “Yes, it may be something of the kind went through my head.”

Settembrini was silent a few paces. Then he said: “So much the better. So much the better if that is true. I am far from claiming to expound an original philosophy⁠—such is not my office. If our engineer here has been making observations in harmony with my own, that only confirms my surmise that he is an intellectual amateur and up to the present, as is the wont of gifted youth, still experimenting with various points of view. The young man with parts is no unwritten page, he is rather one upon which all the writing has already been done, in sympathetic ink, the good and the bad together; it is the schoolmaster’s task to bring out the good, to obliterate forever the bad, by the methods of his profession.⁠—You have been making purchases?” he asked, in a lighter tone.

“No,” Hans Castorp said. “That is, nothing but⁠—”