The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

If certain insinuations on Herr Settembrini's part had angered Hans Castorp, the annoyance was quite unjustified, as also his feeling that the schoolmaster had been spying on him. A blind man must have seen how it stood with the youth; he himself did nothing to conceal his state, being prevented by a certain native and lofty simplicity. He inclined rather to wear his heart upon his sleeve, in contrast -- if you like, favourable contrast -- to the devotee from Mannheim, with his thin hair and furtive mien. But in general we would emphasize the fact that people in Hans Castorp's state regularly feel a craving for self-revelation, an impulse to confess themselves, a blind preoccupation with self, and a thirst to possess the world of their own emotions, which is the more offensive to the sober onlooker, the less sense, reasonableness, or hope there lies in the whole affair.

How people in this state go about to betray themselves is hard to define; but it seems they can neither do nor leave undone anything which would not have that effect -- doubly so, then, in a society like that of the Berghof, where, as the critically minded Herr Settembrini once expressed it, people were possessed of two ideas, and only two: temperature -- and then again temperature. By the second temperature he meant preoccupation with such questions as, for instance, with whom Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt from Vienna consoled herself for the defection of Captain Miklosich -- whether with the Swedish minion, or Lawyer Paravant from Dortmund, or both. Everybody knew that the bond between the lawyer and Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, after subsisting for several months, had been broken by common consent, and that Frau Salomon had followed the leanings of her time of life and taken up with callow youth. The thick-lipped Gänser from Hermine Kleefeld's table was for the present under her wing; she had taken him "to have and to hold," as Frau Stöhr, in legal parlance, yet not without perspicuity, had put it -- and thus Lawyer Paravant was free either to quarrel or to compound with the Swede over the favours of the Frau Consul-General, as seemed to him advisable.