“Then it would be lower still,” Hans Castorp answered, rather confused. Why, indeed, he should have included tobacco and a new wardrobe in his calculation of Joachim’s expenses is a puzzle. But for the rest, his brilliant display of arithmetic had simply been so much dust thrown in his cousin’s eyes; for here, as elsewhere, his mental processes were rather slow than fast, and the truth is that a previous calculation with pencil and paper underlay his present facility. One night on his balcony (for he even took the evening cure out of doors now, like the rest) a sudden thought had struck him and he had got out of his comfortable chair to fetch pencil and paper. As the result of some simple figuring, he concluded that his cousin⁠—or, speaking generally, a patient at the Berghof⁠—would need twelve thousand francs a year to cover the sum total of his expenses. Thus he amused himself by establishing the fact that he, Hans Castorp, could amply afford to live up here, if he chose, being a man of eighteen or nineteen thousand francs yearly income.