“Pardon me, I mean it just the other way. Behrens will finally have to make up his mind to the injections, to get rid of my infection; my temperature sticks at 99.3° to four, five, six, and even seven. I am, and I continue to be, life’s delicate child! I don’t mean I am a long-termer, Rhadamanthus hasn’t let me in for any definite number of months; but he did say it would be nonsense to interrupt the cure, when I’ve been up here so long already, and invested so much time, so to speak. Even if he did set a term, what good would it do me? When he says, for instance, half a year, that is to be taken as the minimum, it is always more. Look at my cousin; he was to have finished the beginning of the month⁠—finished in the sense of being healed, cured⁠—and the last time Behrens saw him, he stuck on four more to make sure he is entirely sound⁠—well, then, where are we? Why, at the summer solstice, just as I said, without the faintest notion of offending you, and on the way to winter. Well, well, for the present what we have before us is Fasching, and as I say, I consider it fit and proper to celebrate it in the usual way, just as it comes in the calender. Frau Stöhr tells me the concierge sells tin horns in his lodge, did you know that?”