“You are putting everything off on him,” Hans Castorp said. “But we can’t know if the responsibility is not hers, of their not living together. One ought to be just. When I look at her and see the unmannerly way she behaves about the door⁠—I assure you she’s no angel; excuse me for saying so. I wouldn’t trust her across the street. But you are so partial. You are blinded by prejudice in her favour.”

This was the line he sometimes took. With a cunning otherwise foreign to his nature he would make out that the schoolmistress’s ravings over Madame Chauchat were not what he very well knew them to be, but an independent phenomenon, of a quaint and amusing kind; about which he, Hans Castorp, made free to tease the old spinster, feeling his own withers unwrung. He risked nothing by this attitude, being confident that his accomplice would agree to anything he said, no matter how wide of the mark.