The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

A week passed before Hans Castorp received, through the Directress von Mylendonk, the summons to present himself in the X-ray laboratory. He had not liked to press matters. The Berghof was a busy place, doctors and assistants had their hands full. New guests had recently come in: two Russian students with shocks of hair and black blouses closed to the throat, showing not a vestige of linen; a Dutch married couple, who were given places at Settembrini's table; and a hunchbacked Mexican, who frightened his table by fearful attacks of asthma, when he would clutch his neighbour, whether man or woman, in an iron grip like a vice, and draw him, as it were, struggling and crying for help, into the circle of his own extremity. The dining-room was nearly full, though the winter season did not actually begin until October. And Hans Castorp's case was scarcely of such severity as to give him any special claim to attention. Frau Stöhr, for all her stupidity and ill breeding, was unquestionably worse off than he -- not to mention Dr. Blumenkohl. One must have lacked all discrimination not to have behaved retiringly, in Hans Castorp's place -- particularly since discrimination was in the atmosphere of the house. The mild cases were of no great account, that he had often heard. They were slightingly spoken of, looked at askance, not only by the more serious and the very serious cases, but even by each other. Logically, of course, each mild case was thus driven to think slightingly of itself; yet preserved its individual self-respect by merging it with the general, as was natural and human.

"Oh," they would say, of this or that patient, "there's not much amiss with him. He hardly even ought to be up here, he has no cavities at all. " Such was the spirit -- it was aristocratic in its own special sense, and Hans Castorp deferred to it, out of an inborn respect for law and order of every sort. It was natural to him to conform to the proverb which bids us, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. And indeed travellers show small breeding when they jeer at the customs and standards of their hosts, for of characteristics that do honour to their possessors there are all sorts and kinds. Even toward Joachim Hans Castorp felt a certain deference -- not so much because he was the older inhabitant, his guide and cicerone in these new surroundings, as because he was unquestionably the more serious case of the two. Such being the attitude, it was easy to understand that each patient inclined to make the most he could of his individual case, even exaggerating its seriousness, so as to belong to the aristocracy, or come as close to it as possible. So Hans Castorp, when asked at table, might add a couple of tenths to his temperature, and could never help feeling flattered when they shook their fingers at him and called him an artful dodger. But even when he laid it on a little, he still remained a member of the lower orders, in whom an attitude of unassuming diffidence was only right and proper.