Datasets:

AIRI-NLP

/

quality_counter_new_3584

like 0

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

fever

How many times the word 'fever' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

making

How many times the word 'making' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

bubble

How many times the word 'bubble' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

sees

How many times the word 'sees' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

doin'

How many times the word 'doin'' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

form

How many times the word 'form' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

able

How many times the word 'able' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

stage

How many times the word 'stage' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

shelf

How many times the word 'shelf' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

readily

How many times the word 'readily' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

objected

How many times the word 'objected' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

y

How many times the word 'y' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

riddle

How many times the word 'riddle' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

eyes

How many times the word 'eyes' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

different

How many times the word 'different' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

seated

How many times the word 'seated' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

inheritor

How many times the word 'inheritor' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

snap

How many times the word 'snap' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

seen

How many times the word 'seen' appears in the text?

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how." "But I don't know him," Edna objected. "No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day." "Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different." "Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when you've learned how," Letty encouraged. "I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in the directory." "Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean." And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly. "I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you know inside forty-eight hours." Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!" * * * "--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist. "Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended. "I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently. "It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?" Edna shook her head. "Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have to do something yourself. Let me see." He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened. "I have it! But no, wait a minute." And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze. "You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops." "I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?" "I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are. "But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to attract many aspirants. "Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management. "But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer." "But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice. "I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?" The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his face. "In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?" "I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming in contact. "Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns." "But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously. "Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want to know. "Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story. Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself." They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know. "And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick. Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you." They had reached the door and were shaking hands. "And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there." Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes. "Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her lips. "Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's advice to talk up. "Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her. She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had not considered the question of a name at all. "Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently. "Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that's it." He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and Saturday." "How much do I get?" Edna demanded. "Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second turn." And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered. Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her wandering boy. Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all. A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies," who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin' hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes. "Hello, girls!" This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking. "Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?" "Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease. "Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly. "For fun; what else?" she countered. "I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin' for a paper, are you?" "I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I, he--well, we didn't get on very well together." "Hittin' 'm for a job?" Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation. "What'd he say?" "That eighteen other girls had already been there that week." "Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it." "And what's your turn?" she asked. "Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know." She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that so?" She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but concealed her amusement. "Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur." "But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn." "Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller. He's the Only, see?" And Edna saw. "To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh." And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the Sunday Intelligencer. "Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn like a lady." It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation. "Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh. But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house piped with startling distinctness: "Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!" A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing the orchestra). But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's arms. The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with her telescope basket and Letty. The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink. But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery. "Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way." She smiled brightly. "Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin' himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?" "I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was honest, too." But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap," he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer not our class, that's straight." After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point. "You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by us, and all that?" "Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really can't." "You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner. "No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate." Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point further. But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two turns, it was he who puzzled her. "You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and successful contribution of your services." That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!" And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand: "My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you." "But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious. "You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember." "It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me think a moment." "Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your 'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again." He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver. "Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?" "Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity. "All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?" "What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up. "That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot." "One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people." THE MINIONS OF MIDAS Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger. He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was made. It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a letter from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in full: It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste." Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question. OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899. MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron: Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish

leavitt--

How many times the word 'leavitt--' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

up

How many times the word 'up' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

armorers

How many times the word 'armorers' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

past

How many times the word 'past' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

again

How many times the word 'again' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

should

How many times the word 'should' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

desirable

How many times the word 'desirable' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

to

How many times the word 'to' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

going

How many times the word 'going' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

territories

How many times the word 'territories' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

act

How many times the word 'act' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

me!--bad

How many times the word 'me!--bad' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

steinbock

How many times the word 'steinbock' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

promises

How many times the word 'promises' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

drawing

How many times the word 'drawing' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

husband

How many times the word 'husband' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

it.--this

How many times the word 'it.--this' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

whom

How many times the word 'whom' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

thieves!--no

How many times the word 'thieves!--no' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

leprosy

How many times the word 'leprosy' appears in the text?

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue." "I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_. "Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon. "Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love. "You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!" "What is it?" asked Claude Vignon. "A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair." "It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----" "On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling. "Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann. "You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie. "Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!" And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic. "It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann. "Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare." "And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?" "If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!" "Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon. "Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--" At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility. And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand. "I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!" "What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart. "Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group." "He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?" "Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock. "He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy." Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock. "Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas." "Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice." "The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot. "I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September." "And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening." "My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you." "Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas. "No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense." Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering: "Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!" But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past. From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me." Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship. In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations? By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother. "At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad boy!" "What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--" "Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired. "Worthy Madame Florent--" "You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?" "Yes, at their house; I made a mistake." "You did not take a coach to come home?" "No." "And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?" "Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way." "It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots. It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled. "Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination. He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen. "Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet." The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her. Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured. "Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!" Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann. "I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?" "He is at the studio." "I came to talk over the work with him." "I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair. Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio. "You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning." "Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt." "And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me." "I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman." Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth. "So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----" Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered. The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous. The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again. "Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!" "If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair. "He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!" Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion. At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!" Reine appeared in answer to his ring. "Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--" Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise. "But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----" "I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel. "He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself. And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner. "I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?" "I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye." Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs. At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack. "Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on. "And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I will go to see her and stab her!" Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses. "Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?" "You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----" She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts. "Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. "I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----" Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. "Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! "Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--" "But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl. "Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes." "Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle." "For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been." Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step. "So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him." "Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab. "Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met." "And yesterday?" "Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us." This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to. There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar. "Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings." "Poor soul!" said Hortense. "Poor soul!" said the Baroness. "But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.' "Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all. "What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like. "Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness. Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!" She sighed deeply. "He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy." "Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?" "Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense. The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence. "Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more." When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband: "Tell me all about last evening." And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company. "Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?" "I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'" This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say: "And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?" "I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!" "Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!" Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: "Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs." "I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand." She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a

can

How many times the word 'can' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

girdle

How many times the word 'girdle' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

starvation

How many times the word 'starvation' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

vision

How many times the word 'vision' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

basis

How many times the word 'basis' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

night

How many times the word 'night' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

moment

How many times the word 'moment' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

thing

How many times the word 'thing' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

mystification

How many times the word 'mystification' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

offer

How many times the word 'offer' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

impressed

How many times the word 'impressed' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

array

How many times the word 'array' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

occurred

How many times the word 'occurred' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

track

How many times the word 'track' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

entered

How many times the word 'entered' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

found

How many times the word 'found' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

demonstrate

How many times the word 'demonstrate' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

say

How many times the word 'say' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

accept

How many times the word 'accept' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

judged

How many times the word 'judged' appears in the text?

"You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bit strange?" "Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right." "All there, eh?" I after an instant risked. I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and _was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs. Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!" That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy; but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?" He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before." "And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?" He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all there." "I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away. "Where are you going?" he asked. "To do what Brissenden came to me for." "But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for." "Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture." My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?" "Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it _is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault." Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder. "And--a--where is it then you meet?" "Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night." He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The household sits up for you?" I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long." His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity. The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with her----?" "My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't you see?--who proposes." "But what in the world----?" "Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you." "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!" "And haven't I admitted that?" "I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced. He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn." "You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?" His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!" He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----" "That," I declared, "will be luminous." He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?" "The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server. XII I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her. A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of it while she watched me. All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance, sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her: it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation: the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances. How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute." I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'" "I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp. But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could. I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_ gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and _I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air. It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of "May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship, for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?" I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel, from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s' tre sauv _. She'll float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my grievance----" "Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention, Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best." "Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I _could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough, tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight, to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really

system

How many times the word 'system' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

air

How many times the word 'air' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

charging

How many times the word 'charging' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

extraordinary

How many times the word 'extraordinary' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

servants

How many times the word 'servants' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

consisted

How many times the word 'consisted' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

which

How many times the word 'which' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

specific

How many times the word 'specific' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

momentary

How many times the word 'momentary' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

forelock

How many times the word 'forelock' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

spoon

How many times the word 'spoon' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

scrivener

How many times the word 'scrivener' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

summer

How many times the word 'summer' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

opportunity

How many times the word 'opportunity' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

rooms

How many times the word 'rooms' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

name

How many times the word 'name' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

carving

How many times the word 'carving' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

small

How many times the word 'small' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

waited

How many times the word 'waited' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

got

How many times the word 'got' appears in the text?

"if that don't make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and forgot me, and went on reading. I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully. "If there ain't Baby!" said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. "Make haste up, Millers." Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be. We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself. "Gracious me, Flopson!" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, "everybody's tumbling!" "Gracious you, indeed, Mum!" returned Flopson, very red in the face; "what have you got there?" "I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket. "Why, if it ain't your footstool!" cried Flopson. "And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book." Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down. Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. Chapter XXIII Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile, "an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension. I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose, if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one. Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business. By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had "read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained the house I saw. Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing. "But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and elegance--" "Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry. "And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--" "Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before. "--That it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket." I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company manners. It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about. Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table. After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them. "Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson. "Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table." Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion. "Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson; "and Miss Jane, come and dance to baby, do!" One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad. Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-table. I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane,-- "You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!" "Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth out." "How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in your chair this moment!" Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if I myself had done something to rouse it. "Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, "how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby." "I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference." "Good God!" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?" "I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!" Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!" The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane. It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless subject. In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it. There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you." "Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me--at some other time." "Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should wish to speak at once, and to speak to master." Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves until he came back. "This is a pretty thing, Belinda!" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!" Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This is that odious Sophia's doing!" "What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket. "Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to you?" "But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda," returned Mr. Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?" "And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making mischief?" Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan. "Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess." There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it advisable to go to bed and leave him. Chapter XXIV After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary. He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me. When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers. "If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there." "Go it!" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get on. Well! How much do you want?" I said I didn't know how much. "Come!" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?" "O, not nearly so much." "Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers. This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "O, more than that." "More than that, eh!" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; "how much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating. "Come!" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?" I said I thought that would do handsomely. "Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?" "What do I make of it?" "Ah!" said Mr. Jaggers; "how much?" "I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling. "Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what you make it." "Twenty pounds, of course." "Wemmick!" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's written order, and pay him twenty pounds." This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner. "Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered Wemmick; "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal; it's professional: only professional." Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful? "Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, "he'd be it." Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, "Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied,-- "We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say." I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use. This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already." "Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?" "These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a

heard

How many times the word 'heard' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

pushes

How many times the word 'pushes' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

lunch

How many times the word 'lunch' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

dream

How many times the word 'dream' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

lot

How many times the word 'lot' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

seriously

How many times the word 'seriously' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

everything

How many times the word 'everything' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

paper

How many times the word 'paper' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

limps

How many times the word 'limps' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

half

How many times the word 'half' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

second

How many times the word 'second' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

shattered

How many times the word 'shattered' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

posteriors

How many times the word 'posteriors' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

jersies

How many times the word 'jersies' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

pulls

How many times the word 'pulls' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

with

How many times the word 'with' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

pulling

How many times the word 'pulling' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

obscure

How many times the word 'obscure' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

jesu

How many times the word 'jesu' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

behind

How many times the word 'behind' appears in the text?

(LOOKS) Oh. MR. BLASE'S P.O.V. We see one of Mr. Blase1s cars. The Homecoming Queen. A bunch of College Kids are pushing it into the lot. MR. BLASE You stay out of this. OUT 2 - 1 7 7 1 2 8 FADE TEROUGH TO: EXT. MR. BLASE CAR LOT - DAY 129 Mr. Blase is standing in front of the Homecoming Queen.- He's got his hands on the hood and is pushing. The KID who bought it is at the other end with his friends. They are pushing the other way. MR. BLASE What guarantee? SZD You gave me your word. MR. BLASE On paper? Can I see it on paper? KID There was no paper. You gave me your word. MR. BLASE I don't remember giving my word. (pushes on the car) Now get this car out of here. Dave appears next to him. Cont. 567 67 129 Cont. DAVE You did, Papa. You gave him your word. I heard you. We are poor, but we're honest. Mr. Blase is stunned. MR. BLASE What? Who're you? He starts to push real hard. KID All I want is a refund. MR. BLASE REFUNDI REFUNDL (REALLY STARTS PUSHING HARD) Are you crazy? Refundl He's getting very red in the face. Hess pushing for all he's worth. The Kids are pushing the other way. Mr. Blase becomes a fanatic. His veins are swelling on his neck. The world becomes'all blurred through his eyes, but he pushes. MR. BLASE RE-FUNDL RE-FUNDL Suddenly the world starts to spin for him. He clutches his chest. He's ready to fall backwards, but with the last gasp of willpower, he gets himself to collapse forward on top of the hood. INT. MR'. BLASE' S BEDROOM - DAY 130 A DOCTOR is listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Mr. Blase is in a coma of sorts. He's muttering something. It sounds very much like "Refund...no refund." The Doctor prepares an injection. CUT TO: INT. THE KITCHEN 131 Mrs. Blase and Dave are sitting at the table. The Doctor comes out of the bedroom. Dave and Mrs. Blase stand up. DOCTOR Well, it's not a stroke, and he won't croak, as we say. Cont. 56 7 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 68 X 131 Cont. DOCTOR (Cont.) (laughs at his own epigram, and lights A CIGARETTE) Seriously, Evelyn. He's in terrible shape. He's a Mack truck with Rabbit engine. Once he's up on his feet he better start using them... walking... exercising... something. Otherwise it's taps city for him. Well, I got to go. He exits. Dave looks guilty. DAVE I ruined everything. MRS. BLASE No, you didn't. He needed a rest and now he's getting one. DAVE I don't think I'll go to the race. I should be here when Papa wakes up. 1 RS . BLASE No, I don't think you should. Here, did I ever show you this. She takes a passport out of her purse on the table. DAVE It's a passport. MRS. BLASE They're quite cheap, you know. A real bargain. I eep carrying it with me. One of these days there'll be a new girl at the IGA and when I want to cash a check she'll ask me for some Indentification and I'll take out my passport and say: Here. Won't that be something. Dave is moved by this gesture: By the spirit of yearning for travel that it implies and by the knowledge that she will probably not go anywhere. DAVE Oh, Mama... Cont. REVISED "BAMBINO" - 8/12 68-A % 131 Cont.l But she will not let him give her any sympathy. MRS. BLASE So,"I think you should go. You should come 'home singing with a trophy. You should do all that. while you can. DAVE I win this one for you, Mama. MRS. BLASE Now that would be nice. EXT. ROAD - DAY 132 We see Mike's car with Dave's bike on top. EXT. STARTING LINE - CLOSEUP - THE ITALIAN TEAM 133 DAY They'are posing Just like in the picture. People are taking pictures of them. They smile and wave making sure not to obscure the "Cinzano" on their jersies as they do. Cont. 567 69 133 Cont. ANNOUNCER We are proud to have with us today the famous Team Cinzano from Italy. They are touring America and so far are undefeated. Later on they have been kind enough to agree to hold a racing clinic which none of you should miss. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the crowd of other racers and like all of them, his eyes are glued on the Italians. ANOTHER ANGLE Dave is putting a banana and an apple in the back pocket of his Jersey. Other riders are doing likewise. Almost all of them are taking bananas. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Everybody please move to the starting Line. A MONTAGE OF LEGS We see all kinds of legs. Some are milky white. Others are tanned. Some are long and skinny. Others short and bulging with muscles. MONTAGE OF POSTERIORS One after another, we see, the riders' rears meet the saddles of their bicycles. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's in the middle of the pack. He looks over his shoulder and waves to Mike, Cyril and Moocher on the sideline. CLOSEUP - THE ITALIANS They are in the front. They are looking straight ahead. ANNOUNCER (o.s. ) Riders ready[ Timers ready! A gun is fired. The Italians take off. Cont. 567 70 133 Cont.1 ANOTHER ANGLE We see the pack from the back as it moves forward slowly and then faster, and faster, the riders in the back working their way up. LONG SHOT The huge pack of riders is now disappearing around a bend in the road. TRUCKING SHOT 134 We PICK UP the last rider in the field and MOVE PAST him. There are stragglers already: individuals and little groups, and then a large group. We MOVE PAST them TOWARD: ANGLE ON THE LEAD GROUP The Italians, Dave and half a dozen other riders are in the lead group. They are separated from the rest by about half a mile. Some riders in the group are eating their bananas. Others are drinking water. They are approaching a hill. The Italians shift their gears and like clockwork the rest of the riders do the same. The Italians start sprinting up the hill The others pursue. Strain is showing on everybody. LONG SHOT We see the pack climbing the hill. ANGLE ON CREST OF THE HILL The Italians appear first.. They look back over their shoulders and see nobody there. They nod to each other and continue over the crest, shifting into a higher gear for the descent. Dave and three riders appear over the crest. Dave is in the lead. As he goes over the crest, he shifts gears and starts to sprint. The other riders cannot match him. CUT TO: ANGLE ON ITALIANS They are bent over their frames in their descent positions. Their knees and elbows are tucked in and they are coasting down the hill. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE He's in the similar position only he's not coasting. He's pumping as hard as he can. 567 CUT TO: Cont. 71 134 Cont. ANGLE ON THE ITALIANS They are still in their descent. The hill is steep and they are going very fast. Suddenly, Dave, bent over and breathing hard appears in the FRAME. He tries to appear that he's not tired. He smiles. DAVE Buon giorno. Come sta? The Italians look stunned. The 1ST ITALIAN is annoyed. The ZTH ITALIAN seems amused. CUT TO: FRONT SHOT - THE FLATS 135 The Italians are riding hard. The effort is showing on their faces. Dave is behind them. He too is tired. But when the 1st Italian looks back to see how Dave is doing Dave manages to smile. This seems to "psyche" the lst Italian out. He gestures angrily to Dave to take his turn up front. Dave is thrilled at the command. He moves to the front. The following conversations will have to be subtitled. DAVE Oggi fa caldo, none vero? (It's hot today isn't it?) 1ST ITALIAN Roba da chiodi] (You don't say]) FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON DAVE "PULLING" He's up front breaking wind for the others. He's working hard and he's tired. The Italians behind him are likewise. Dave swings off to let another rider pull in front. As he does Dave once again smiles. He doesn't do this to fool them. He's just thrilled to be in their company. DAVE 'Cho tempo Para piovera? (Do you think it'll rain?) 1ST ITALIAN FILAREI (SCRAM] ) The nth Italian tries to calm him down. Cant. 567 72 135 Cont. 4TH ITALIAN Not to la prenderel (Don't get yourself worked up!) But the lst Italian is upset. He wants to drop Dave. But he doesn't want to kill himself doing it. He's thinking. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE HILL 136 The Italians are switching off as they begin another ascent. It's Dave's turn to take the lead. As he goes up front the 1st Italian reaches in and pushes Dave's lever all the way forward. This suddenly shifts Dave into a very high gear. He can hardly turn the cranks. The 1st Italian smiles at him. 1ST ITALIAN MI SCUSII (Excuse me!) He takes off. The other three follow him while Dave fumbles around to get back in the right gear. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - THE 1ST ITALIAN He does not look happy. The CAMERA MOVES BACK and we SEE Dave at the front again. CLOSEUP - DAVE He's getting a little more serious. He sees a huge pothole in front of him. He rides right toward it and then at the last second he jerks his bike aside. The 1st Italian goes right over the pothole. He's jarred and angry. Dave looks back. Smiles. DAVE Mi scusi! The 4th Italian appreciates this little reversal. The lst Italian is getting a brutal look in his face. OUT 137 FADE THROUGH TO: 567 73 138 ANGLE ON THE FLATS All five of them are continually taking turns being up front. They are approaching a small hill. The lst Italian points to the hill. Dave is too exhausted now to fake any smiles. The pace is as hard as it's been. FADE THROUGH TO: ANGLE ON THE CREST OF THE HILL 139 Dave is up front. Behind him we see the 2ND ITALIAN taking out his pump. Dave pulls off to let him take the lead but as he does the lst Italian pulls up behind him to block his way back. The 3RD ITALIAN sprints up front to block his way forward. Dave is trapped. The 3rd Italian puts on his brakes. Dave puts on his to avoid running into him. As his speed slows down the 2nd Italian sticks his pump into Dave's rear wheel. Dave sees all this. In the split second that it takes, he sees it all. His wheel collapses and Dave tumbles off the road falling down the steep grade. The Italians ride off. The 4th Italian slows down a little to look at Dave. He seems genuinely sorry about what happened but he too continues. He shouts after his teammates. He's a little angry. 4TH ITALIAN ..Bravo[ Bravo[ Bella robal (Congratulations[ Nice work[) CLOSEUP - DAVE His left leg is hurt but more than that his dream seems shattered. EXT. RACE FINISH 140 The tour Italians are sprinting toward the finish line. A large "FINISH" sign flutters in the breeze. The 4th Italian wins and as he does he turns and fives the "Italian finger" to his three buddies. He's still angry at them. Cyril, Mike and Moocher look for Dave. The crowd is cheering. EXT. ROAD - DAY 140-A All the guys are riding in silence. Dave is crushed by his shattered Italian dream. Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony is playing: the second movement. They drive past the finish line of the race. The big cloth sign "FINISH" is still up fluttering in the wind. A man is taking it down. Everybody else is gone. Dave looks on heartbroken. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 74 X 140-A Cant. CYRIL I feel like one of those dwarfs ...you know...when they think that Snow White's dead. Mike turns to Dave. MISS So I guess you're just a cutter .again like the rest of us. DAVE I guess. EXT. MOOCHER'S HOUSE - DAY 141 Mike's car stops and lets Moocher out. Car.drives o.a. Moocher is walking toward his house. He stops. MOOCHER'S P.O.Y. He sees a.big "SOLD" sign tacked over the FOR SALE sign. INT. BLASE HOUSE - DAY 142 Mr. and Mrs. Blase are sitting in the kitchen. MR. BLASE No, I don't feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference. The door opens and Dave limps inside. He looks terrible. Blood is still caked up on his left leg. MRS. BLASE What happened to you? It's nothing. How''re you feeling, Dad? Mr. Blase can't believe he's being called "Dad." MR. BLASE Dad. I'll tell you how I'm feeling. I've had nightmares all night that everybody I ever sold a car to is going to come in and ask for a refund. And you'll be there handing out the checks. One for you...and one for you... Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 75 142 Cont. DAVE I'm sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats, Dad. I just didn't know. Mr. Blase is a little taken aback by this..' He doesn't feel quite right about it. Re's a tiny bit ashamed. MR. BLASE Well, now you know. So, where's the trophy? DAVE Oh, Dad... He can't help himself anymore. He bursts into tears and hugs his father. Mr. Blase doesn't know what to do. His arms are out as if he doesn't know how to embrace. MR. BLASE What? What is this? Look ...you don't have to be this miserable. A little is all I asked for. (FINALLY EMBRACES HIM) What're you crying for? You'd think you lost your wallet or something. (even strokes his hair a bit) Talk to him, Evelyn. %. He looks up at her and she's so touched by this show of affections that she too is crying. MR. BLASE And. what're you doing? Mrs. Blase shakes her head, but she shakes it in a certain way that makes Mr. Blase a little troubled. He looks at her again. CLOSEUP - MRS. BLASE Through her tea's there's a little trace of a smile appearing. FADE THROUGH TO: INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 143 He's taking down the last Italian poster and crumpling it up. The cat meows. DAVE You; hungry, Jake, is that it? 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 76 143 Cont. ANOTHER ANGLE We SEE Mr. Blase standing in the doorway looking at him. MR. BLASE Dave. DAVE Yes, Dad. OUT 144- I EXT. MR. BLASE'S CAR - NIGHT 146 Mr. Blase is driving. Dave is next to him. X EXT. CAMPUS - NIGHT 146-A The campus is deserted. Dave and Mr. Blase are walking slowly outside a huge classroom building. Mr. Blase lights a cigarette. MR. BLASE Just one.. Don't tell mother. (looking at the BUILDING) You know, I do.this every now and then. Come here at night and...I cut the stone for that building over there-... DAVE Yes,. I know, Dad. MR. BLASE I was one fine stonecutter... Mike's dad...Moocher's, Cyrii's ...we all were. Well, Cyril's dad...Ah, never mind. The thing is. I loved it. I was young, slim and strong and damn proud of my work. .and the buildings went up...and when they were finished...damnest thing happened. It was like the buildings were X too good for us. Nobody told us that. But we just felt uncomfortable. Even now. I'd like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone but I feel out of place. I suppose you guys still go swimming in the quarries. 567 Cant. REVISED - "BAZ INO" - 6/16/78 77 X 146-A Cont. DAVE Sure. MR. BLASE So, all you get from my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind. DAVE I don't mind. MR. BLASE I didn't either when 'I was your age. But...Eh, Cyril's Dad says he took that college exam. DAVE Yeah, both of us did. MR. BLASE ' So, how did...how did both of you do? DAVE Well, I think, eh, one of us did all right. But neither of us...eh...I won't go, Dad. The hell with them. I'm not ashamed of being a cutter. I don't want you feeling bad. MR. BLASE Don't do me any favors, eh. What, you afraid. DAVE Yeah, a little. And then, there's the rest of the guys. MR. BLASE Well, you took the exam. You did all right, eh? DAVE Yeah. MR. BLASE Well, that's...that's good. Your mom... (pauses, wants to say something, CAN'T) She's a"fine woman. Coat.. 567 REVISED - "BA1 INO - 8.,(12.78 77-A 146-A Cont. 1 Both of them smile. Both are a little confused. Mr. Blase puts out'the cigarette. Puts arm around Dave and heads back to the car. INT. DAVE'S ROOM -- NIGHT 147 Dave is on the telephone. DAVE Yes, can I speak to Ka... Eathy, please. A doorbell is heard. MOOCHER (o.s.) They sold any house and Dave said I could stay here for a bit. Dave hangs up the phone as Cyril and Moocher enter carrying Moocher's barbell set and a suitcase. CYRIL Can I sleep over too. MOOCHER THE UNIVERSITY bought my dad's X house. MR. BLASE (o.s.) There goes the neighborhood. FADE THROUGH TO: EXT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 148 Mike is sitting in the car looking at Dave's room. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and seems to be debating whether he should join the rest of the guys. INT. DAVE'S ROOM - NIGHT 149 All three guys are sleeping on the floor. Cyril is in the middle. All are awake and silent. CYRIL Our year's almost up...and... well...if anybody's got plans that don't include me...that's all right. I've got plans myself that don't include me. Cont. 567 REVISED - "BAbIBINO" - 8/12/78 78 X 14+9 Cant. He tries to laugh but doesn't. Puts one arm around Moocher another one around Dave and closes his eyes. OUT 150 ECT. BLOOMINGTON - DAY 151 Dave and Moocher are walking. DAVE I tried-calling her on the phone to tell her but- 3:...l Just couldn't. MOOCHER When she sees you in the race she'll find out. Maybe if she really likes you she won't care. You know Nancy and I... DAVE (CUTTING IN) What a mess. You're a Catholic, Moocher. You ever go to confession? b400CEER Twice. DAVE Did it make you feel any better? Once. OUT 152 INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - DAY 153 Dave is in a confession booth. DAVE Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. INT. PRIEST'S BOOTH PRIEST What have you done, my son? Cant. 567 79 153 Cont. DAVE I have lied and cheated. I told this real nice girl that I'm Italian. PRIEST Why did you do that? DAVE I guess... well...I wanted to be Italian. I guess I still do. PRIEST Me too. Ah, Romal Believe me, son, it's hard as hell to make it up the ladder of the church hierarchy if you're not Italian. You ever hear of an Irish Pope? You take St. Mary, now. In Italian it's Santa Maria. Ah, 'Santa Maria.' Do you know Silent Night in Italian? Fan-tastic. Even secular words like watermelon. 'Concomero.' DAVE What should I do , Father? PRIEST Call me Padre, per favore. You see the difference? 'Padre.' EXT. CAMPUS - DAY 154 Dave is waiting outside a classroom building. His hair is combed in an American style now. Students are coming out. Katherine among them. She sees him and is stunned. KATMMINE God. What did you do to your hair? DAVE I...wel1...I just... KATHERINE I liked it better before. You look like everybody else now. She starts to mess it up with her hands in order to comb it back into its original shape. The results are not flattering. DAVE I am everybody else. I mean... 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAI4BINO" - 811278 80 154 Cant. She laughs. You look funny. DAVE You see, Katherine... A K THERINE Katherina! DAVE I feel terrible. His Italian accent is no longer in use and it makes Katherine ,just a tiny bit nervous. KATHERINE You sound real funny tonight. Che Cosa, Franco? DAVE My name is Dave Blase. KATHERINE: What's that supposed to mean? DAVE Nothing. It's just a name. I made it all up. I was born in Bloomington. I went to Bloomington High. I was the treasurer of the Latin Club and head of the Ushers for our assembly programs...I... KATHERINE Stop kidding around. DAVE I'm what you call 'a cutter.' F Only I'm not really a cutter either, so I don't know what I am. KATHERINE And Napoli...and the big family... Dave just nods that they were all lies. KAT IE Well, it was a good act. You certainly fooled me. Cont. 567 81 RrVISED - '"BAMBOO" - 9/13/78 X 154 Cont.1 DAVE I just didn't know how else... KATHERINE Do you know what you are? DAVE No, I haven't a clue. KATEINE I'll tell you what you are. (STARTS CRYING) I'll tell you. You...You... But she's too upset to tell him anything. She runs inside the classroom. The doors close. Dave stands still. The door opens. Dave smiles as Katherine reappears. She runs up to him and slaps him on the face and then runs back inside. CLOSEUP - DAVE His face changes from a guilt-ridden sinner to one of almost anger. Not quite. But there is a hint there of: The hell with her thenI EXT. DAVE' s HOUSE - DAY 155 Mike is holding the Little 500 bike. It's heavy and ungainly in comparison to Dave's Italian racer. Dave looks at the bike. Mike, Cyril and Moocher look at him. DAVE Can't I even add some toe-clips? MIKE No, it's official issue. They said you can't add or change a thing. DAVE It's a piece of junkl CYRIL But it's got a nice personality. And it's had its rabies shots already. MOOCHER I don't think it looks so bad. DAVE That's because you don't have to ride it. Cont. 56 7 81-A REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 9/13/78 X 155 Cont. MOOCHER You don't have to either, Dave. We're not going to beg you. CYRIL Plead perhaps, but beg...never. We have our pride. MISS The hell with it. At least we got invited. That's something. I'll take it back. He starts to take the bike away. DAVE You actually seem relieved, Mike. Mike pauses. DAVE You don't think we can win more, do you? Mike is silent. DAVE Why not? KIKE Well, maybe they are better. DAVE I've never heard you say that before. MIBE Thatts because I ,never felt it before. CYRIL My dad would be proud of you. Our family motto is: It can't be done. DAVE We'll see about that. He takes the bike from Mike and starts wheeling it away. He gets on it and rides it into the garage. The guys look at each other. NOISE is HEARD coming from the garage. 567 REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/15/18 82 INT. MR. BLASE'S GARAGE - DAY 156 The entire bike is dismantled. The wheels are off. The bearings on the wheels are out. The cranks are off and the crankshaft has been removed. Dave is holding the saddle in his hand. He's pushing down on it. It's very hard. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN pouring olive oil into a large pan. The pan is on a hotplate. He puts the saddle into the pan and covers it. Mrs. Blase in the kitchen. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE truing one of the wheels. It's in the truing stand and he's tightening the spokes with a spoke wrench. He spins the wheel. It spins fine. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE x reassembling the rear wheel. Putting grease on the ball bearings. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - KITCHEN X taking the saddle out of pot of olive oil. He feels the saddle. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE assembling the crankshaft and putting on the cranks. He spins the cranks. They spin rapidly on their own. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE taking the. chain out of a kerosene bath. CUT TO: ANGLE ON DAVE - GARAGE oiling the chain. CUT TO: 567 Cont. RE ISID r IIBAMBI17O" - 6/16/78 83 X 156 Cont. ANGLE ON ENTIRE BIKE assembled. Dave is finishing the job by putting on handlebar tape. CUT TO: CLOSEUP - DAVE He's all dirty. The bike is clean. He looks at it. It's much better now but his face suggests that it's still what it is. OUT 157 EXT. -BLOOMINGTON - DAY 158 Dave is riding his Little 500 bike. He's testing the bike as well as himself and trying to get used to the new machine. He tries sprinting and in mid-spring he stops pedaling. His hand grasps his left leg. He's in pain. He drops his foot off the pedal and shakes his leg as-if trying to shake out a cramp. EXT. DOWTOWN BLOOMINGTON - DUSK 158-A Katherine is walking slowly through the deserted town. She turns the corner and sees Dave sitting on the curb. His Little 500 bike is leaning against the parking meter. She looks at him. Wonders whether to say anything. Hello. Dave looks. He stands up quickly. He's stunned to see her here. DAVE What're you doing here? Katherine shrugs. They both half smile at each other. SATAEAINE Guess what? Now Dave shrugs. DAVE I don't know.. KATD1E I got a job in Chicago. Cont. 567 REVISED - 'BAMBINO" - 8/12 8 83-A-83-B 158-A Cont. DAVE. Moocher's dad in Chicago. He's... He waves this remark away. KATHERINE And I'm going to Italy after all. With my parents. Dave almost slips into an Italian gesture. DAVE I wish...I wish you a nice trip. KATHERINE You too. DAVE I'm not going anywhere. KATHERINE I don't know about that. X X She walks away. INT. BLASE HOUSE - NIGHT 159 It's dinnertime. Dave and Moocher are having meat and potatoes. Mr.. Blase is comtemplating halt a head of lettuce and some crackers. Mrs. Blase is at the stove. MR. BLASE If you eat so much, Moocher, how come you're so damn small? MOOCHER It's my metabolism, Mr. Blase. I eat three times a day, but my metabolism eats five times a day. MR. BLASE Well, I go back to work tomorrow. DAVE Aren't you going to come and see us race, Dad? MRS. BLASE He's afraid he'll bring you bad luck if he comes. Cont. 567 REVISED -"BAMBINO" 8/12/78 84 X 159 Cont. MR. BLASE I've got work to do. That's all. Besides,-there might be another metabolism feed around here. DAVE You mean you might be a father. MR. BLASE Yes, I might, and your mom might be- a mother and you might be a brother. That way I keep it all in the family. MOOCHER I didn't think people your age... Mr. Blase interrupts. MR. BLASE The'next. word might be your last, kid. Dave looks at him. Then he looks at his mother. She smiles. Dave looks back at his father. Dave jumps up and hugs his mother. MOOCHER You must be very happy, Mr. Blase. MR. BLASE Of course I must. You think I have any choice? MRS. BLASE You said you were going to give them a pep talk. MR. BLASE They don't need pep.. I need pep. Go ahead...Give it to them. Mrs. Blase opens a kitchen drawer and takes out some folded T-shirts. MRS. BLASE We thought... MR. BLASE (INTERRUPTS) Since you're going to be out there you.might as well tell them who you are. 567 Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8/12/78 85 X 159 Cont.1 He looks at Dave. OUT 160 INT. LITTLE 500 STADIUM 161 The crowd is cheering as various teams enter to take their designated pit areas. A triumphal march is playing. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They are entering the stadium. Dave is pushing his bike along. ANOTHER ANGLE We see them from the back. The word "CUTTERS" is stamped on the back of their T-shirts. There is something comical about this team. They are so uneven. Cyril is very tall. Moocher is very short. They are walking out of step. All the other teams are matched in height to accommodate the use of a bike w.th a set saddle position. CLOSEUP - OUR GUYS They seem very nervous. The roar of the crowd. The other teams. The foreign turf once again. Mike seems the most nervous of all. They walk past Rod's team. Rod is smiling and staring at Mike. Mike looks away. Cyril doesn't. FADE THROUGH TO: CLOSEUP - TEE STARTER 162 The crowd is hushed. STARTER Gentlemen, mount your bicycles! A great roar is heard. M E D. SHOT A pace car is leading the field around the track for one lap. Dignitaries from the campus sit in the pace car: Mr. Armstrong. ANOTHER ANGLE The pace car is going faster. ANOTHER ANGLE The starter waves the flag as they go past him. The car speeds up and gets off the track. The race is on. 567 CUT TO: Cont. REVISED - "BAMBINO" - 8 8 86 162 Cont. CLOSEUP - .THE RACE The riders begin their mad scramble for positions. The entire width of the track is taken up by them. Rod is in first place. Dave is dead last but trying to move up. CLOSEUP..- DAVE He's riding and looking for openings. Whenever. a little space offers itself,

hopeful--

How many times the word 'hopeful--' appears in the text?