At last, Hans speaks to Frau Chauchat, in Mann's Magic Mountain

At last, at about the midway point in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1927) the protagonist, Hans, gets up the courage to speak to the woman he’s admired from afar for about 6 months, a fellow “patient” at the Berghof sanatorium, Clavdia Chauchat, a beautiful, exotic married woman af about 30. Has literally blunders into a conversation w/ her by asking the nearest person – her – if he could borrow a pencil (an exchange that echoes a memory from his school days when he asked the student, a boy, on whom he’d had a crush, for the loan of a pencil, make of that what you will). They then begin their first conversation; it’s obvious that she knows he’s been staring at her for months, and she knows quite a bit about him. This is his opening, and he embarks on a long and complex declaration of love (most of this part of the novel is in French, fine if you can read French but I wonder why the Vintage edition couldn’t provide a translation for those who can’t) – gushingly romantic dwelling in a weird way on her skin, her elbows, her kneecaps, totally strange. Her reaction is what we would expect: after leading him on she pretty much says “see you later, kid” – she’s decamping the next morning. It’s obvious that if any relationship were possible it would be one in which she’d lead him around like a puppy on a leash. Over the next few chapters we’ll see how, or whether, he will recover (will his minimal disease flare up in a more dangerous manner?) from this flirtation, teasing, and, ultimately, dumping – that is, putting him back in his place (he seems completely naïve about love and sex; she is obviously experienced – and dangerous, with her Russian husband somewhere in the background).