It made him uncomfortable to have the hand so close beneath his eye, to be forced to look at it whether he wished or no, to study it in all its human blemishes and imperfections, as though under a magnifying-glass. No, there was nothing aristocratic about this stubby schoolgirl hand, with the badly cut nails. He was even not quite sure that the ends of the fingers were perfectly clean; and the skin round the nails was distinctly bitten. Hans Castorp made a face; but his eyes remained fixed on Madame Chauchat’s back, as he vaguely recalled what Dr. Krokowski had been saying, about counteracting influences of a bourgeois kind, which set themselves up against the power of love.⁠—The arm, in its gentle upward curve, was better than the hand; it was scarcely clothed, for the material of the sleeve was thinner than that of the blouse, being the lightest gauze, which had the effect of lending the arm a sort of shadowed radiance, making it prettier than it might otherwise have been. It was at once both full and slender⁠—in all probability cool to the touch. No, so far as the arm went, the idea about counteracting bourgeois influences did not apply.