Chapter 4, continued Summary

On Tuesday, Hans receives his first weekly bill. During a visit to the sanatorium's business offices, Hans learns from Joachim that Dr. Behrens arrived ten years earlier with his sick wife, whom he buried. Besides being an excellent diagnostician and well-known surgeon, he is an amateur painter who received the mocking aristocratic title "Hofrat" from a tubercular nobleman who used to sneak off to town for gambling.

Hans' tablemate, the elderly spinster Fraulein Engelhart, notices Hans' interest in Clavdia Chauchat and talks about her as a way of taking part vicariously in a love affair, since she has given up on one for herself. Hans notices that Clavdia doesn't wear a wedding band. The spinster tells him that Madame Chauchat lives apart from her husband by choice. He and Fraulein Engelhart tease each other as if it's she who is infatuated...