and how they hang together, or time with human progress, and how if there was no time there could be no human progress, and the world would be only a standing drain and stagnant puddle⁠—what should I have known of all that if it weren’t for you? So I simply address you as though we were old and close friends, without further ceremony, and you must excuse me, because I don’t know any other way. You sit there, and I speak to you like this, and it is all that’s necessary. For you are not, to me, just any man, with a name, like another; you are a representative, Herr Settembrini, an ambassador to this place and to me. Yes, that is what you are,” Hans Castorp asserted, and struck the table with the flat of his hand. “So now I will thank you,” he went on, and shoved his champagne and burgundy along the table toward Herr Settembrini’s coffee-cup, as though to touch glasses with him. “I thank you for having taken trouble for me in these seven months, for having lent a hand to a young donkey in all the new experiences that came to him, and tried to influence him for his good⁠— sine pecunia