Joachim went down, and the “midday broth” was brought⁠—“broth” in a symbolic sense merely, considering in what it consisted. Hans Castorp was not on sick-diet. He lay there and paid full pension, and what they brought him in the abiding present of that midday hour was by no means broth, it was the full six-course Berghof dinner, in all its amplitude, with nothing left out. Even on weekdays this was a sumptuous meal; on Sundays it was a gala banquet and “gaudy,” prepared by a cosmopolitan chef in the kitchens of the establishment, which were precisely those of a European hotel deluxe. The “dining-room girl” whose duty it was to serve the bedridden brought it to him in dainty cook-pots under nickel-plated dish-covers. She produced an invalid-table, a marvel of one-legged equilibrium, adjusted it across his bed, and Hans Castorp banqueted like the tailor’s son in the fairy-story.