She accepted with no false pride the fruits of his charity or his unquenched love, whichever it was, seeing herself quite humbly as a dishonoured and sinful creature; and so bore all the plagues of Job with astounding patience and resilience, with the elementary powers of resistance of her sex, which triumphed over all the misery of her tawny body, and even made of the gauze dressings which she had to wear about her head a becoming personal adornment. She changed her jewels many times in the day, began with corals in the morning and ended at night with pearls. Hans Castorp’s flowers greatly delighted her; she obviously regarded them as the expression of gallant rather than charitable sentiments, and invited both young men to tea in her room. She drank from an invalid cup, all her fingers decked to the joint with opals, amethysts, and emeralds; in no long time she had told her guests her story, the golden earrings swaying as she talked. Told of her respectable, tiresome husband, her no less respectable and tiresome children, who were precisely like their father, and for whom she had not been able to feel great warmth of affection; of the half boy, half man with whom she had fled, whose poetic tenderness she never tired of describing.