She stood in the dining-room after a meal, her hands in the pockets of her sweater, and charmingly struggled to converse in German with another patient, probably a rest-hall acquaintance. Hans Castorp felt an unwonted thrill⁠—never before had he been so proud of his mother-tongue⁠—yet at the same time experienced a temptation to offer up his pride on the altar of quite a different feeling⁠—the rapture which filled him at the sound of her pretty stammerings and manglings of his speech.

In a word, Hans Castorp envisaged in this opening affair between him and the heedless creature who was a member of the Berghof society no more than a holiday adventure. Before the tribunal of reason, conscience, and common sense it could make no claims to be heard; principally, of course, because when all was said and done, Frau Chauchat was an ailing woman, feeble, fevered, and tainted within; her physical condition had much to do with the questionable life she led, as also with Hans Castorp’s instinctive reservations. No, it simply did not occur to him to seek her society; while as for the rest⁠—well, however the thing turned out, it would be over in one way or another inside ten days, when he would enter upon his apprenticeship at Tunder and Wilms’s.