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TheLadder/tools/story-to-pack/probe/plaintales/claude/REFERENCE.html
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5.5 3a4758172d story-to-pack: add the corpora and the catalogue v2/v3
Fourteen corpora split and classified: aesop, bierce, chekhov, holmes,
keefe, lawson, lorimer, maupassant, nobody, plaintales, poe, torchy,
wallingford and winesburg, each with its splitter and the hand-written
groups and pages; catalogue v2 and v3; and the shared splitters
gutenberg_chunks.py, se_split.py and se_build.py.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019rwKTmug58sEsJ72AuWsEi
2026-10-07 06:05:51 -04:00

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<h1>Plain Tales from the Hills: reference groups</h1>
<p class="meta">Rudyard Kipling, 1888 (Project Gutenberg #1858). 35 stories, 287 scenes cut by the same rule as <code>chunk.py</code>.
Summaries, predicaments, groups and options written by Claude by reading every scene: no local inference.
A comparison baseline, not a pack. Option moves give a direction only, never a number.</p>
<section><h2>G01 · A word from someone powerful</h2>
<p class="pred">What you want will go to whoever has someone powerful speaking for them, and nobody powerful is speaking for you.</p>
<p class="meta">A junior with no connections wants a good place from someone with influence. · 7 scenes from 5 stories
(Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais, Yoked With An Unbeliever, Consequences, The House Of Suddhoo, A Bank Fraud) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Do someone influential a daring favour, then ask for yours. <span class='src'>from scene 93</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.patron +</code> <code>flags.favour_owed set</code></li><li>Take the place your family arranged, and be grateful. <span class='src'>from scene 37</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.family +</code> <code>flags.placed_by_favour set</code></li><li>Turn the powerful person you offended into your ally. <span class='src'>from scene 34</span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>relationships.patron +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Find out whose favourite is after your place. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.rival -</code></li><li>Let your work speak for itself, and wait. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>standing -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>34</b> · <i>Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais</i> — Exposed while defending a woman, a man turns the powerful person he just threatened into an ally against her disapproving parents.</summary><p class="sum">The old man, once he understands, roars with laughter, admits he deserved a thrashing, and offers to talk the title-loving father round.</p></details><details><summary><b>35</b> · <i>Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais</i> — A powerful patron&#x27;s word wins over parents who refused a suitor on his own merits, and their consent comes almost at once.</summary><p class="sum">With the great man&#x27;s weight behind him, the lover borrows clothes and wins the parents&#x27; consent within minutes.</p></details><details><summary><b>37</b> · <i>Yoked With An Unbeliever</i> — A shiftless young man is packed off to a distant post a relative arranged, vowing to reform, save money and return to marry.</summary><p class="sum">After a proverb, a shiftless young man sails out to a plantation job his uncle found him, vowing to reform, save his salary and come back to marry his tearful sweetheart.</p></details><details><summary><b>92</b> · <i>Consequences</i> — A clever, charming junior stuck in an obscure post wants a permanent, well-paid place near the top, and has no connections at all.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, a clever, charming young officer from an obscure station wants to escape his regiment for a permanent appointment in the hill capital.</p></details><details><summary><b>93</b> · <i>Consequences</i> — A clever junior does an influential woman a daring favour, and asks her in return to win him a good appointment.</summary><p class="sum">He forges the date on an invitation for a clever society woman who has been snubbed; grateful, she asks what she can do, and he asks her to get him a good appointment.</p></details><details><summary><b>127</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — An old man counts you his friend because your word once got his relative a post, and expects great things of you in return.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator describes the tenants of an old man&#x27;s house in the city: a moneylender, a man who claims to cut seals, two courtesans; the old man counts him a friend because his recommendation got a relative a post.</p></details><details><summary><b>172</b> · <i>A Bank Fraud</i> — A subordinate does not know he got his post through a patron&#x27;s favour, and is about to lose it to someone else&#x27;s favourite.</summary><p class="sum">The accountant was foisted on the bank through a politician&#x27;s favour; now a director wants his own nominee in; the doctor asks the manager if he knows how sick the man is.</p></details></section><section><h2>G02 · The power behind the title</h2>
<p class="pred">The person with the title is not the one who decides, and the one who really does answers to nobody.</p>
<p class="meta">A person below wants to stay on the right side of the real power from someone with sway but no title. · 5 scenes from 4 stories
(Watches Of The Night, Consequences, A Germ Destroyer, Kidnapped) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Court them quietly, as everyone else does. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>relationships.power_broker +</code> <code>standing +</code></li><li>Keep out of their way and give them nothing to talk about. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>tact +</code></li><li>Ask them to use their pull for you, and leave the rest to them. <span class='src'>from scene 115 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.power_broker +</code> <code>flags.in_their_debt set</code></li><li>Let them overreach, then tell the story against them in public. <span class='src'>from scene 111</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.power_broker -</code> <code>standing +</code></li><li>Defy them, whatever they say about you afterwards. <span class='src'>from scene 81 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>relationships.power_broker -</code> <code>flags.made_an_enemy set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>79</b> · <i>Watches Of The Night</i> — A superior&#x27;s spouse who manufactures scandal has already wrecked marriages and engagements, and everyone beneath her fears her tongue.</summary><p class="sum">The colonel&#x27;s pious wife is a suspicious gossip who has wrecked a marriage, stopped an engagement and caused a young wife&#x27;s death.</p></details><details><summary><b>94</b> · <i>Consequences</i> — An influential woman sets out to win a post for her protege, while those at the top grow obsessed with keeping everything secret.</summary><p class="sum">She weighs which great men she can work on, while a new viceroy&#x27;s craze for official secrecy grips the government.</p></details><details><summary><b>106</b> · <i>A Germ Destroyer</i> — A leader&#x27;s officious right hand keeps pulling matters outside his remit into his own grasp, and the leader simply lets him do it.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, a new viceroy brings a hard, officious private secretary who keeps drawing matters outside his province into his own hands, while the viceroy watches, amused.</p></details><details><summary><b>111</b> · <i>A Germ Destroyer</i> — The one at the top retells a comic tale until his overbearing right hand takes the hint, resigns, and leaves with glowing praise.</summary><p class="sum">The viceroy laughs till he cries; the tale of the secretary&#x27;s friend with the powder goes round, and at a picnic the viceroy jokes that his secretary hired an assassin, until the secretary takes the hint and resigns with a glowing reference.</p></details><details><summary><b>116</b> · <i>Kidnapped</i> — Friends arrange for a young man to be carried off until the day he was to marry has passed, leaving the bride&#x27;s family humiliated.</summary><p class="sum">He finds himself gazetted on leave, is carried off by camel with the three men for seven weeks, and the wedding day passes with no bridegroom while the bride&#x27;s family is mocked.</p></details></section><section><h2>G03 · One chance to be heard at the top</h2>
<p class="pred">The one person who can settle your matter is almost impossible to reach, and you may get a single chance to be heard.</p>
<p class="meta">A person with a case wants a hearing from someone at the very top. · 7 scenes from 3 stories
(Consequences, A Germ Destroyer, Tod&#x27;S Amendment) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Go straight to the most powerful person you can reach, and show what you know. <span class='src'>from scene 98</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>standing risk</code> <code>relationships.the_top risk</code></li><li>Put your case plainly and let it stand. <span class='src'>from scene 184</span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>relationships.the_top +</code></li><li>Make a spectacle of it, so they cannot forget you. <span class='src'>from scene 110</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>relationships.the_top +</code> <code>flags.made_a_scene set</code></li><li>Win over someone they already listen to. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>relationships.go_between +</code></li><li>Go through the proper channels, and wait. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>relationships.gatekeeper +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>98</b> · <i>Consequences</i> — A junior shows the most powerful person he can reach that he knows their secrets, and remarks that the last appointment went by favour.</summary><p class="sum">He calls on the most powerful man in government, quotes the secret notes from memory, and remarks that the last appointment went by favour; the man promises to see, then tries to block him.</p></details><details><summary><b>99</b> · <i>Consequences</i> — Unable to block him, those at the top give a troublesome junior the post he wanted, and warn him never to try it again.</summary><p class="sum">After eleven days of uproar they give him the appointment to keep him quiet; the viceroy warns it is not done twice, and the woman reflects on what fools men are.</p></details><details><summary><b>108</b> · <i>A Germ Destroyer</i> — Getting a word with the person at the top is nearly impossible, unless you are grand enough to demand an audience.</summary><p class="sum">It is hard to get a hearing with the viceroy, unless one is as grand as a pompous senior official of nearly the same name, who has come to confer.</p></details><details><summary><b>109</b> · <i>A Germ Destroyer</i> — A gatekeeper&#x27;s slip hands an obscure enthusiast the private audience meant for someone grand, and he means to make the most of it.</summary><p class="sum">The secretary drops a letter from the name, and the invitation to a private lunch goes to the inventor, who talks of his theory and tips his powder into the ash-tray.</p></details><details><summary><b>110</b> · <i>A Germ Destroyer</i> — Granted one private audience with the person at the top, an outsider makes a spectacular scene, and the leader roars with laughter.</summary><p class="sum">He lights the powder; choking smoke fills the house, guards and ladies panic, and the viceroy, prostrate with laughter, declares it a magnificent success.</p></details><details><summary><b>184</b> · <i>Tod&#x27;S Amendment</i> — Relaying what the people affected actually say, a child explains exactly why a well-meant rule from above will hurt them.</summary><p class="sum">He relays a shopkeeper&#x27;s case: five-year leases mean fresh stamps, fees and courts every few years, while fifteen would give a man and his son peace.</p></details><details><summary><b>185</b> · <i>Tod&#x27;S Amendment</i> — Convinced by an unexpected voice from below, a powerful rule-maker quietly consults the people affected and changes the rule.</summary><p class="sum">Struck, the legal member makes careful inquiries among the people concerned, amends the tenure clause, and the boy becomes a hero of the bazaar without understanding why.</p></details></section><section><h2>G04 · A change imposed by someone who does not know the ground</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone set over you is imposing a change on something they do not understand, and nobody who knows better has been asked.</p>
<p class="meta">A person below wants the old ways kept, or at least a say from someone newly in charge. · 6 scenes from 4 stories
(Consequences, Tod&#x27;S Amendment, The Rout Of The White Hussars, The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Obey, and keep your opinion to yourself. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>relationships.superior +</code> <code>relationships.company -</code></li><li>Offer to put it right yourselves, at your own cost. <span class='src'>from scene 206</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.company +</code> <code>relationships.superior -</code></li><li>Get the facts to them through someone they will listen to. <span class='src'>from scene 184 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>relationships.superior +</code></li><li>Work quietly round the order. <span class='src'>from scene 207 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.superior risk</code> <code>flags.defied_quietly set</code></li><li>Grumble with the others, and change nothing. <span class='src'>from scene 247</span><br><code>relationships.company +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>95</b> · <i>Consequences</i> — Those at the top keep every decision secret on principle, down to the smallest appointment, and pride themselves that nothing ever leaks.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator explains that the government commits its most sensitive orders to paper and circulates them by hand.</p></details><details><summary><b>180</b> · <i>Tod&#x27;S Amendment</i> — Those at the top write a rule to protect people they have never asked, and get the most important point wrong.</summary><p class="sum">The council is finishing a land bill that limits leases to five years to protect tenants; the narrator says it is correct in theory and wrong in practice.</p></details><details><summary><b>181</b> · <i>Tod&#x27;S Amendment</i> — Someone conscientious at the top drafts a rule for people he has never spoken with, and everyone between is too busy to warn him.</summary><p class="sum">Nobody consulted the people affected; the conscientious legal member knows only English-speaking notables, and the busy district officers make no representations.</p></details><details><summary><b>205</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — A new superior insults a proud company and gets rid of the beloved symbol of its pride on a whim.</summary><p class="sum">A new colonel tells the regiment it is not smart enough and casts its beloved old drum-horse, which it paid dearly for and which is the soul of the regiment.</p></details><details><summary><b>206</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — When a new superior sells off what his people hold sacred, their offer to buy it back is forbidden as insubordination.</summary><p class="sum">The drum-horse is replaced by an ugly beast and put up for public auction; the regiment is near mutiny, and when the troopers offer to buy him the colonel forbids it as mutinous.</p></details><details><summary><b>247</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — When a careful host dies, his successor cuts corners everywhere, and the old regulars can only grumble among themselves.</summary><p class="sum">The proprietor&#x27;s nephew now runs the house shabbily with the old man&#x27;s woman, adulterates the drug, lets the room decay and scrimps on the idol&#x27;s incense.</p></details></section><section><h2>G05 · Knowing what goes on below</h2>
<p class="pred">You know what really goes on among people nobody above you bothers to ask, and that knowledge could settle a matter.</p>
<p class="meta">A person who mixes below wants to put what they know to use from those who never ask. · 6 scenes from 4 stories
(Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais, Tod&#x27;S Amendment, The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case, To Be Held For Reference) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Tell the people at the top what they have not heard. <span class='src'>from scene 182</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.the_top +</code></li><li>Go among them yourself, quietly, and find out. <span class='src'>from scene 221</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.went_among_them set</code></li><li>Let the liars see that you know, and watch them fold. <span class='src'>from scene 222</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.accuser -</code></li><li>Keep it to yourself: nobody above values it anyway. <span class='src'>from scene 28 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing -</code></li><li>Trade what you know for a better place. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>money +</code> <code>relationships.the_top +</code> <code>relationships.informants -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>32</b> · <i>Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais</i> — Living at the bottom of the household, a man learns what the people above him never see, and longs for the life he left.</summary><p class="sum">He learns the underside of society from the bottom and aches on nights of music he cannot join.</p></details><details><summary><b>179</b> · <i>Tod&#x27;S Amendment</i> — A child who mixes freely with everyone at the bottom hears what the people at the top never do.</summary><p class="sum">The boy is idolised by the household servants and the bearers, speaks the local languages, talks with shopkeepers and labourers, and repeats their hard sayings at breakfast.</p></details><details><summary><b>182</b> · <i>Tod&#x27;S Amendment</i> — At a gathering, a child who talks with ordinary people offers a powerful guest a view nobody else present has heard.</summary><p class="sum">At his mother&#x27;s dinner the boy, in his dressing-gown, hears the bill named and tells the legal member he knows all about it from his friends in the bazaar.</p></details><details><summary><b>221</b> · <i>The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case</i> — Friends of a falsely accused man call in the one person who can find the truth, and he secretly proves it is a frame-up.</summary><p class="sum">The accused&#x27;s friends telegraph for the master of disguise, now married, who comes gladly, spends three weeks disguised about the accuser&#x27;s house, and finds the case invented from start to finish.</p></details><details><summary><b>222</b> · <i>The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case</i> — At the hearing, a man who knows every witness&#x27;s secret merely lets them see him, and the key witness collapses and recants.</summary><p class="sum">In court he greets the chief witness with a private word that shows he knows all, and the terrified man recants every detail.</p></details><details><summary><b>279</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — A fallen man patronises his visitor as ignorant of everything around him, while living contentedly by ways his old world despises.</summary><p class="sum">He lectures the narrator on his ignorance of the life around him, and they eat together with the woman who loves him and has stayed with him three years.</p></details></section><section><h2>G06 · Good work that counts for nothing</h2>
<p class="pred">You do the job better than those above you, and it earns you nothing but their resentment.</p>
<p class="meta">A capable junior wants credit for good work from those above who take it. · 5 scenes from 4 stories
(Thrown Away, Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais, In The Pride Of His Youth, Wressley Of The Foreign Office) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Keep doing it well, and say nothing. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>flags.unrewarded set</code></li><li>Go back to doing it your own way once their anger passes. <span class='src'>from scene 29</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.superiors -</code></li><li>Take nothing seriously, since good work goes to others anyway. <span class='src'>from scene 16</span><br><code>relationships.colleagues +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Make sure the right person sees what you did. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.superiors risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>16</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — In a new place where good work goes uncredited and bad work unpunished, a newcomer must decide how seriously to take anything at all.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator&#x27;s cynical creed: in this country good work goes to others, bad work goes unpunished, and the wise man takes nothing seriously.</p></details><details><summary><b>27</b> · <i>Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais</i> — A man who knows the ground better than anyone is distrusted by his own side, and his rare skill earns him no advancement.</summary><p class="sum">After a proverb, the narrator introduces a policeman who studies the country&#x27;s hidden life, and the one master of disguise he models himself on, who is never rewarded for it.</p></details><details><summary><b>29</b> · <i>Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais</i> — A junior who solves what his seniors could not is resented for showing up their failure, and gains nothing by it.</summary><p class="sum">He solves a great murder case in disguise, but it does him no good because it shows up his seniors&#x27; incapacity.</p></details><details><summary><b>190</b> · <i>In The Pride Of His Youth</i> — A junior works like two men for more money, but those above him pay by age, not merit, and refuse him a real rise.</summary><p class="sum">Haunted by fear of dying and leaving his wife unprovided, he works like a horse, but his employers pay by age, not merit, and give him only a boy&#x27;s rises.</p></details><details><summary><b>263</b> · <i>Wressley Of The Foreign Office</i> — In a big undertaking, one expert does the real work while those above him repeat his words and collect the credit.</summary><p class="sum">A middle-aged official is said to know more about the princely states than any man alive; his superiors echo his words and feel they are guiding the empire, while he does the work.</p></details></section><section><h2>G07 · Work nobody sees</h2>
<p class="pred">You are carrying far more work than anyone knows, and the only people who notice are the ones who profit from it.</p>
<p class="meta">A overloaded worker wants to hold it all together from those who pile it on. · 8 scenes from 6 stories
(The Conversion Of Aurelian Mcgoggin, In Error, A Bank Fraud, In The Pride Of His Youth, Pig, Wressley Of The Foreign Office) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Sit up nights and get it all done. <span class='src'>from scene 199</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>flags.overworked set</code></li><li>Keep going on their praise alone. <span class='src'>from scene 264</span><br><code>relationships.superiors +</code> <code>flags.overworked set</code></li><li>Tell someone what you are carrying. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.colleagues +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Find your own private relief, and tell nobody. <span class='src'>from scene 163</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.secret_vice set</code></li><li>Take the rest you are owed. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>standing -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>103</b> · <i>The Conversion Of Aurelian Mcgoggin</i> — A junior works himself far past his strength, fretting over every rebuke, and ignores every warning that he is heading for collapse.</summary><p class="sum">He cannot take an order without improving on it, overworks in the heat, frets over rebukes, and ignores the doctor; one evening he mocks a man for giving thanks for rain.</p></details><details><summary><b>163</b> · <i>In Error</i> — Left alone for years at a remote post with heavy work, a capable man privately takes to a drinking habit that nobody sees.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, an engineer left alone four years in an out-district does his work well but takes to secret, solitary drinking that ages him.</p></details><details><summary><b>174</b> · <i>A Bank Fraud</i> — Hiding a dying subordinate&#x27;s dismissal, his superior takes on double work and patiently endures his lectures and ingratitude.</summary><p class="sum">Nightly he shows the dying man the books, invents sympathetic letters from the directors, and endures his lectures on his manager&#x27;s sinful ways after double days of work.</p></details><details><summary><b>189</b> · <i>In The Pride Of His Youth</i> — Secretly supporting a family, a junior lives so meanly that his colleagues shun him as a miser, and he cannot explain why.</summary><p class="sum">He cannot afford ponies or shared lodgings, lives in one bare room by the office, sleeps on the roof, and people stop asking him out because he seems a miser.</p></details><details><summary><b>199</b> · <i>Pig</i> — Eager not to look ignorant, a conscientious junior sits up nights answering endless requests on top of his real work.</summary><p class="sum">The rival produces maps, tables and surveys, sitting up nights on top of his own work and a special duty elsewhere, too proud to seem ignorant.</p></details><details><summary><b>200</b> · <i>Pig</i> — Question after question draws a conscientious man into ever longer answers, every page carefully filed by the one who means him harm.</summary><p class="sum">New questions draw ever longer answers and a thirty-three-page theory, all carefully filed by the vengeful man, who asks for more.</p></details><details><summary><b>264</b> · <i>Wressley Of The Foreign Office</i> — An indispensable worker is kept at his desk by praise from above, while almost nobody knows who he is or what he does.</summary><p class="sum">His superiors keep him working by praise, even the viceroy&#x27;s, until he believes himself indispensable; yet hardly anyone knows who he is, and his work leaves no time for friends.</p></details><details><summary><b>267</b> · <i>Wressley Of The Foreign Office</i> — Working blind for someone else&#x27;s sake, a man toils day and night and produces the finest work of his whole life.</summary><p class="sum">He works ten hours a day for two hundred and thirty days, and love makes the book a masterpiece; the narrator notes how women drive men out of the ranks and then lose interest.</p></details></section><section><h2>G08 · The strain gives way</h2>
<p class="pred">The strain you hid for months has finally broken through, and now everyone can see what it has done to you.</p>
<p class="meta">A person at breaking point wants to recover without losing everything from those who see it. · 6 scenes from 5 stories
(The Conversion Of Aurelian Mcgoggin, The Broken Link Handicapped, In Error, In The Pride Of His Youth, Pig) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Take leave, and go away to mend. <span class='src'>from scene 105</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>flags.on_leave set</code></li><li>Throw it all up and walk away. <span class='src'>from scene 193</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>money -</code> <code>flags.walked_out set</code></li><li>Beg to be let go quietly. <span class='src'>from scene 154</span><br><code>relationships.superior +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Let it be passed off as illness, and carry on. <span class='src'>from scene 167 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>flags.covered_up set</code></li><li>Snap back at whoever pushed you there. <span class='src'>from scene 201</span><br><code>relationships.tormentor -</code> <code>standing risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>104</b> · <i>The Conversion Of Aurelian Mcgoggin</i> — In the middle of lecturing everyone around him, an overworked young man suddenly loses the power of speech in front of them all.</summary><p class="sum">Mid-lecture his words turn to gibberish and he is struck dumb as the storm breaks; the doctor diagnoses aphasia from overwork.</p></details><details><summary><b>105</b> · <i>The Conversion Of Aurelian Mcgoggin</i> — After a breakdown he cannot explain, a proud young man is humbled, frightened and sent away for months to rest.</summary><p class="sum">His speech returns in two days, but he is cowed, cannot trust his own mind, and goes on three months&#x27; leave in fear.</p></details><details><summary><b>154</b> · <i>The Broken Link Handicapped</i> — His nerve broken for good, a ruined competitor begs to be dismissed and walks away while others sneer at him.</summary><p class="sum">The jockey&#x27;s nerve is gone for good; he asks for a thrashing and his dismissal, and walks away muttering the dead man&#x27;s words while others sneer.</p></details><details><summary><b>166</b> · <i>In Error</i> — A man&#x27;s hidden weakness finally breaks out, and in his collapse he pours out everything he had kept locked away.</summary><p class="sum">He collapses into delirium tremens and for hours whispers out his soul, his worship of her and his shame.</p></details><details><summary><b>193</b> · <i>In The Pride Of His Youth</i> — Just as a broken young man resigns in despair, those above him finally offer the promotion that would have saved everything.</summary><p class="sum">Broken, he resigns; after three days the head of the firm offers him, for his proven ability, a far better post at six hundred and fifty rupees.</p></details><details><summary><b>201</b> · <i>Pig</i> — After more than a year of pointless demands, an exhausted man lets slip one flippant reply to the person who keeps asking.</summary><p class="sum">After fourteen months of questions on bristles and hides, the weary rival writes a flippant suggestion that his correspondent raise his pigs before tanning them.</p></details></section><section><h2>G09 · The rules nobody tells you</h2>
<p class="pred">You are new, and everyone around you follows rules nobody will explain until you have broken them.</p>
<p class="meta">A newcomer wants to fit in on their own terms from the old hands. · 6 scenes from 4 stories
(Thrown Away, The Conversion Of Aurelian Mcgoggin, His Wedded Wife, A Bank Fraud) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Keep telling them how things ought to be done. <span class='src'>from scene 171</span><br><code>relationships.old_hands -</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Take the teasing without a word, and bide your time. <span class='src'>from scene 140 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>relationships.old_hands +</code></li><li>Throw yourself into everything they do. <span class='src'>from scene 17</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.old_hands +</code> <code>flags.overreached set</code></li><li>Watch and learn before you open your mouth. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>tact +</code></li><li>Ask someone you trust what is expected. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.mentor +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>17</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — A newcomer throws himself into every amusement and quarrel, losing money and health, and nobody tells him the rules everyone else knows.</summary><p class="sum">The boy takes everything seriously, gambling, women and quarrels, losing money and health, and nobody tells him what everyone else knows.</p></details><details><summary><b>100</b> · <i>The Conversion Of Aurelian Mcgoggin</i> — A brilliant newcomer arrives full of borrowed theories, including the notion that obeying an order is worse than giving one.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator introduces a brilliant young civil servant who has brought out a fashionable godless creed, one tenet of which is that obeying an order is sinful.</p></details><details><summary><b>102</b> · <i>The Conversion Of Aurelian Mcgoggin</i> — A clever junior keeps lecturing his elders on his opinions, and they try to mock and shout him into silence.</summary><p class="sum">He preaches his creed at the club until his seniors throw cushions and nicknames at him; his superior calls him an idiot, though his work would have carried him far.</p></details><details><summary><b>139</b> · <i>His Wedded Wife</i> — A shy newcomer who does none of the things his new company prizes is teased relentlessly to knock him into shape.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, a pretty, awkward new subaltern who cannot do any of the things his smart regiment prizes is ragged to knock him into shape.</p></details><details><summary><b>170</b> · <i>A Bank Fraud</i> — A narrow, arrogant newcomer is sent to work under you, convinced that those at the top picked him for his brilliance.</summary><p class="sum">The directors send him a new accountant: arrogant, narrow, new to the country, and convinced they chose him for his brilliant talents.</p></details><details><summary><b>171</b> · <i>A Bank Fraud</i> — A conceited subordinate keeps lecturing his superior on how to do the job, and boasting of his friends at the top.</summary><p class="sum">The two cannot get on; the accountant despises the manager&#x27;s friends and way of life, lectures him on how to run the bank, and is often sick, leaving double work.</p></details></section><section><h2>G10 · Sent out young, with nobody watching</h2>
<p class="pred">You have been sent out young to your first real post, far from anyone who knows you, and you are starting to go wrong.</p>
<p class="meta">A young man in his first post wants to make good from the people who could warn him and do not. · 7 scenes from 4 stories
(Thrown Away, Yoked With An Unbeliever, The Rescue Of Pluffles, In The Pride Of His Youth) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Do enough to get by, and congratulate yourself. <span class='src'>from scene 38</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>flags.drifting set</code></li><li>Take one scolding to heart and decide you are ruined. <span class='src'>from scene 18</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>flags.despairing set</code></li><li>Cut your spending and live on what you have. <span class='src'>from scene 188</span><br><code>money +</code> <code>relationships.colleagues -</code></li><li>Find an older hand who has been there, and listen. <span class='src'>from scene 25 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.mentor +</code></li><li>Write home as if all is well. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.family +</code> <code>flags.hiding_trouble set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>14</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — A young man raised with every protection is about to meet all of the world&#x27;s temptations at once, with nobody to warn him.</summary><p class="sum">After a verse epigraph, the narrator argues that a boy raised under a sheltered life meets the world&#x27;s dangers too late and too hard, like a puppy kept from soap.</p></details><details><summary><b>15</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — A young man who never gave his family a moment&#x27;s worry leaves them for his first post, with nobody left to fall back on.</summary><p class="sum">The boy, who never gave his parents a moment&#x27;s worry, slips at his training, disappoints his family, and is sent out alone to his first posting.</p></details><details><summary><b>18</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — After a season of excess, a young man is scolded by someone above him and privately decides he is ruined beyond repair.</summary><p class="sum">After a season of excess a severe rebuke from his commanding officer makes him more wretched, and he privately believes himself ruined beyond redemption.</p></details><details><summary><b>38</b> · <i>Yoked With An Unbeliever</i> — A weak young man at a distant post works adequately and congratulates himself, while his sweetheart&#x27;s family objects to the match.</summary><p class="sum">Weak and extravagant but likeable, he works passably and credits himself for it, while his sweetheart&#x27;s family objects to the engagement.</p></details><details><summary><b>59</b> · <i>The Rescue Of Pluffles</i> — Nobody warns a young man he is being ruined, and the one above him, disliking his engagement, calls it good training.</summary><p class="sum">Nobody warns him; his commanding officer, who hates married juniors, calls it good training; he runs up debts while his fiancee prepares to come out.</p></details><details><summary><b>186</b> · <i>In The Pride Of His Youth</i> — A young man rushes into a secret marriage just before leaving for his first post abroad, sure that everything will work out.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator tells how a young man, a month before sailing out to his first appointment, married a slightly older girl secretly before the registrar.</p></details><details><summary><b>188</b> · <i>In The Pride Of His Youth</i> — A young man&#x27;s salary, splendid from afar, barely stretches to cover what he must secretly send home to his wife.</summary><p class="sum">The salary that looked large at home goes nowhere; he sends more than half of it to his wife and must still save for her passage while learning strange work.</p></details></section><section><h2>G11 · The marriage or the career</h2>
<p class="pred">The marriage you want would cost you your prospects, and the people above you have made clear which they expect you to choose.</p>
<p class="meta">A ambitious junior wants both love and advancement from those who control their prospects. · 7 scenes from 4 stories
(Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais, His Chance In Life, Kidnapped, In The Pride Of His Youth) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Marry anyway, and take the consequences. <span class='src'>from scene 114</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>standing -</code> <code>flags.married_against_advice set</code></li><li>Marry in secret, and keep it from those above you. <span class='src'>from scene 187</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>money -</code> <code>flags.secret_marriage set</code></li><li>Give up the work you love to win consent. <span class='src'>from scene 36</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>standing +</code> <code>flags.gave_up_calling set</code></li><li>Earn the promotion first, whatever it takes. <span class='src'>from scene 75 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>money +</code> <code>relationships.beloved risk</code></li><li>Let the match go, and keep your career. <span class='src'>from scene 117 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.beloved -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>36</b> · <i>Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais</i> — A man wins his marriage on condition that he gives up the unconventional work he loves for safe routine that leads upward.</summary><p class="sum">They marry on condition he drops his old ways for departmental routine that pays and leads upward; he keeps his word, at a cost.</p></details><details><summary><b>73</b> · <i>His Chance In Life</i> — A young man may marry the woman he loves only if he somehow earns far more than his post will ever pay him.</summary><p class="sum">The mother consents only if he earns fifty rupees a month, far beyond his prospects; the lovers swear fidelity and he is transferred to a remote office.</p></details><details><summary><b>77</b> · <i>His Chance In Life</i> — A superior&#x27;s report of a junior&#x27;s courage in a crisis earns him the promotion he needed to marry, though he could never repeat it.</summary><p class="sum">The official&#x27;s report earns him a transfer on a salary big enough to marry; he could never repeat the deed.</p></details><details><summary><b>113</b> · <i>Kidnapped</i> — A quiet, model junior with a brilliant career ahead is about to throw it away, and everyone above him is alarmed.</summary><p class="sum">He proposes a matrimonial department, then introduces a quiet, self-contained young official with a brilliant career, praised by all his superiors for knowing when to hold his tongue.</p></details><details><summary><b>114</b> · <i>Kidnapped</i> — A promising junior insists on marrying someone his whole circle considers impossible, a match that would weigh on his career for ever.</summary><p class="sum">He falls in love with a good, lovely girl from a poor family his world considers socially impossible; the match would weigh on his career for ever, and he will hear no remonstrance.</p></details><details><summary><b>187</b> · <i>In The Pride Of His Youth</i> — Newly and secretly married, a young man leaves his wife behind, planning to send for her once his fine salary allows.</summary><p class="sum">The marriage is to stay secret for a year until she can come out; he sails, and she waits in a cheap room in London.</p></details><details><summary><b>191</b> · <i>In The Pride Of His Youth</i> — Warned that marriage would cost him his post, a junior hides his wife and child, and cannot show grief when his child dies.</summary><p class="sum">His wife&#x27;s letters grow querulous; he hears that marriage would cost a junior his post; then his baby son dies, and he must show no sign of grief.</p></details></section><section><h2>G12 · A good match your heart refuses</h2>
<p class="pred">Your family wants you to accept a well-placed match, and your heart is with someone who has no prospects at all.</p>
<p class="meta">A young woman wants to marry for love from a family with ambitions for her. · 5 scenes from 4 stories
(Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais, Yoked With An Unbeliever, Cupid&#x27;S Arrows, The Other Man) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Give in, and marry where they choose. <span class='src'>from scene 86</span><br><code>relationships.family +</code> <code>money +</code> <code>relationships.beloved -</code></li><li>Tell them calmly that you have chosen, and keep saying it. <span class='src'>from scene 2 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.family -</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Let the one you love find a way round your parents. <span class='src'>from scene 30</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>cunning +</code></li><li>Slip away to the one you love whenever you can. <span class='src'>from scene 66 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>relationships.family -</code></li><li>Wait for them, however long it takes. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>relationships.family -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>30</b> · <i>Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais</i> — Refused a woman&#x27;s hand by parents who scorn his poor prospects, a man takes a humble place in their household to stay near her.</summary><p class="sum">He falls in love, but her parents refuse a man from the worst-paid department with strange ways; he takes leave and hires on in disguise as her groom.</p></details><details><summary><b>39</b> · <i>Yoked With An Unbeliever</i> — Pressed by her family and neglected by an absent sweetheart, a young woman marries the eligible suitor instead and declares herself heartbroken.</summary><p class="sum">He forgets her for weeks at a time; under family pressure she marries an eligible suitor and writes him a stormy letter.</p></details><details><summary><b>64</b> · <i>Cupid&#x27;S Arrows</i> — A pretty young woman of modest family is courted by a powerful, very ugly older man, and her mother is overjoyed.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, a pretty girl of modest family is courted by a rich, powerful and extraordinarily ugly senior official, to her mother&#x27;s delight.</p></details><details><summary><b>86</b> · <i>The Other Man</i> — Her parents make a young woman marry a well-off man thirty-five years older, though her heart is already given to someone else.</summary><p class="sum">After a ballad epigraph, a young girl&#x27;s parents make her marry a sickly, well-off officer some thirty-five years older.</p></details><details><summary><b>87</b> · <i>The Other Man</i> — A young woman&#x27;s engagement to a poor man is broken by a parent&#x27;s tears, and he takes himself off to the worst post available.</summary><p class="sum">She loved a poor man with no prospects; her mother broke the engagement by weeping, and he had himself transferred to the worst station he could find.</p></details></section><section><h2>G13 · Someone else wants them too</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone else is after the person you want, and the contest is being fought out in front of everyone you know.</p>
<p class="meta">A suitor or spouse wants the person they love from a rival. · 12 scenes from 4 stories
(Three And--An Extra, False Dawn, The Rescue Of Pluffles, Cupid&#x27;S Arrows) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Say nothing, then outshine the rival on one evening. <span class='src'>from scene 10</span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>relationships.rival -</code> <code>relationships.beloved +</code></li><li>Choose in public, and let the loser be humiliated. <span class='src'>from scene 68</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>relationships.rival -</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Reclaim them before everyone, laughing. <span class='src'>from scene 12</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>standing +</code></li><li>Treat them kindly where the rival used them. <span class='src'>from scene 61 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>relationships.rival -</code></li><li>Take your time, and keep everyone guessing. <span class='src'>from scene 45</span><br><code>relationships.beloved risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>10</b> · <i>Three And--An Extra</i> — A wife who sees her husband slipping away to a rival quietly stakes everything on one evening&#x27;s plan to win him back.</summary><p class="sum">Seeing he meant to go with the rival all along, the wife decides her living husband matters more than her grief and prepares a stunning dress in secret.</p></details><details><summary><b>11</b> · <i>Three And--An Extra</i> — A neglected wife appears at her best in public, and her wandering husband finds himself begging her for the favour of a dance.</summary><p class="sum">At the ball she outshines everyone and fills her card; the husband, dazzled, crosses the room to beg her for a dance.</p></details><details><summary><b>12</b> · <i>Three And--An Extra</i> — A wife reclaims her husband in front of everyone, and he leaves the rival to take the blame for his own wandering.</summary><p class="sum">She strikes the rival&#x27;s dances off his card with a pet name, and at supper he snubs the rival as if the mistake were hers.</p></details><details><summary><b>13</b> · <i>Three And--An Extra</i> — A clever schemer who has lost the contest admits that a patient rival she underrated managed things better than she could.</summary><p class="sum">The couple go home together; the defeated rival wryly admits that the silliest woman can manage a clever man.</p></details><details><summary><b>44</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — A conceited man who means to propose must choose between two close sisters, and everyone around them assumes they know which one.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator introduces a conceited, popular man who means to propose to the prettier of two sisters, and warns against praising a sister to a sister.</p></details><details><summary><b>45</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — Two sisters who both hope for the same man never let each other out of sight, while he gives no sign either way.</summary><p class="sum">The sisters go everywhere together, each wary of the other; he divides his attentions evenly and gives no sign.</p></details><details><summary><b>55</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — A man publicly claims the woman he truly loves before the whole gathering, while the sister he proposed to looks on.</summary><p class="sum">They ride back at dawn; the suitor kisses her in front of the whole picnic, who applaud as at a play.</p></details><details><summary><b>60</b> · <i>The Rescue Of Pluffles</i> — A clever woman sets out to rescue a foolish young man from a rival&#x27;s clutches, knowing everyone will misread her motives.</summary><p class="sum">The clever woman decides he will break his engagement to please the other, and fights a seven-week social war to win him away, while people say shameful things about her.</p></details><details><summary><b>66</b> · <i>Cupid&#x27;S Arrows</i> — Pushed by her mother toward a powerful, ugly suitor, a young woman keeps slipping away to a handsome admirer with no prospects.</summary><p class="sum">The girl enjoys his attention but prefers a handsome young officer with no prospects; her mother scolds her and reminds her of the precedence she would gain.</p></details><details><summary><b>67</b> · <i>Cupid&#x27;S Arrows</i> — A powerful suitor stages a public contest whose prize everyone understands means accepting him, and the young woman must compete.</summary><p class="sum">The suitor stages an archery contest with a diamond bracelet everyone knows is meant for her, winning it to mean accepting him.</p></details><details><summary><b>68</b> · <i>Cupid&#x27;S Arrows</i> — Before the whole of society, a young woman deliberately throws a contest she could easily win, publicly refusing a powerful suitor.</summary><p class="sum">Seeing his smug smile, she nods to her young man and deliberately shoots wide, into the supports and the ground, before the whole assembly.</p></details><details><summary><b>69</b> · <i>Cupid&#x27;S Arrows</i> — A public refusal leaves a powerful man humiliated and a mother in tears, while the young woman leaves with the suitor she chose.</summary><p class="sum">A plain schoolgirl wins; the suitor must present the prize, the mother weeps in public, and the young officer takes the girl away.</p></details></section><section><h2>G14 · Everyone will hear of it</h2>
<p class="pred">Something embarrassing has happened, and in a place where everyone knows everyone the story will follow you unless it is kept quiet.</p>
<p class="meta">A person with a story to bury wants to keep their name out of it from the gossips. · 6 scenes from 6 stories
(Watches Of The Night, The Other Man, The Arrest Of Lieutenant Golightly, The Rout Of The White Hussars, Venus Annodomini, The Bisara Of Pooree) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Beg the one person who saw it to say nothing. <span class='src'>from scene 125</span><br><code>relationships.witness +</code> <code>flags.owes_silence set</code></li><li>Put about a harmless cover story. <span class='src'>from scene 91 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>flags.cover_story set</code></li><li>Settle it in private, with no public scandal. <span class='src'>from scene 237</span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>relationships.culprit -</code></li><li>Punish everyone involved, publicly. <span class='src'>from scene 214 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.company -</code></li><li>Laugh at it first and loudest. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>standing +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>84</b> · <i>Watches Of The Night</i> — A gossip who ruined others is ruined in turn by a tale about her own household, and everyone around her laughs.</summary><p class="sum">Her faith in her husband is gone and her life spoiled, while the station, told the story by her enemy, laughs at her.</p></details><details><summary><b>90</b> · <i>The Other Man</i> — A bystander who stumbles on a woman&#x27;s secret grief must get her away quietly before her name becomes part of the scandal.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator, the only witness, pays the driver, keeps her name out of it, and gets her away by force.</p></details><details><summary><b>125</b> · <i>The Arrest Of Lieutenant Golightly</i> — Rescued from a humiliating mistake, a man begs his superior to keep it quiet, then wastes months seeking redress as the story spreads.</summary><p class="sum">The senior officer recognises him; he begs him not to tell the mess, then spends the summer trying to have his captors court-martialled while the story spreads through the province.</p></details><details><summary><b>215</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — A wise deputy persuades an enraged superior that punishing a mocking hoax in public would only make everyone a laughingstock.</summary><p class="sum">The second-in-command argues that any action would make the regiment a laughingstock across the army and cannot be proved against any officer; the colonel slowly calms down.</p></details><details><summary><b>228</b> · <i>Venus Annodomini</i> — A young man&#x27;s open infatuation makes him a target for his colleagues&#x27; teasing, and everyone around pities him for it.</summary><p class="sum">He is openly miserable; his fellow officers make his life a burden; everyone pities him and agrees it is not her fault.</p></details><details><summary><b>237</b> · <i>The Bisara Of Pooree</i> — With the stolen thing recovered, the thief is named in private, his engagement collapses, and he quietly takes himself elsewhere.</summary><p class="sum">The collector takes it back and calls the suitor a thief; the young woman breaks off the engagement and he leaves; the charm is hidden on a pony&#x27;s necklace.</p></details></section><section><h2>G15 · Everyone has already decided</h2>
<p class="pred">Everything looks against you, and the people whose opinion matters have made up their minds before you can explain.</p>
<p class="meta">A person wrongly suspected wants to be believed from those who have judged them. · 8 scenes from 4 stories
(Watches Of The Night, The Arrest Of Lieutenant Golightly, His Wedded Wife, The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Explain again, at length, from the beginning. <span class='src'>from scene 122</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.accusers -</code></li><li>Deny it flatly and say no more. <span class='src'>from scene 82</span><br><code>relationships.spouse -</code> <code>flags.under_suspicion set</code></li><li>Ask to see their proof. <span class='src'>from scene 144</span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>standing +</code></li><li>Call in someone who can find out the truth. <span class='src'>from scene 221 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.friends +</code></li><li>Keep your temper, and wait for someone who knows you. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>tact +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>80</b> · <i>Watches Of The Night</i> — A man comes home very late with a true but unlikely excuse, and a suspicious spouse refuses to believe a word of it.</summary><p class="sum">The young officer is thrown from his cart onto a woman&#x27;s lawn and loses the colonel&#x27;s watch there; the colonel loses the other watch and comes home late with an excuse his wife rejects.</p></details><details><summary><b>82</b> · <i>Watches Of The Night</i> — A spouse confronts a partner with what looks like evidence of betrayal, and every denial only deepens the suspicion.</summary><p class="sum">The wife confronts the colonel; he admits the watch is his but denies everything else, and she pours out her jealousy and hatred.</p></details><details><summary><b>83</b> · <i>Watches Of The Night</i> — Someone who has spread suspicion about others now feels its poison herself, and cannot bring herself to believe the innocent explanation.</summary><p class="sum">Holding the watch, the wife feels a little of the suspicion she has inflicted on others, but cannot believe her husband against appearances.</p></details><details><summary><b>122</b> · <i>The Arrest Of Lieutenant Golightly</i> — Mistaken for a wanted man, someone explains at length who he really is, and the more he explains, the less anyone believes him.</summary><p class="sum">Handcuffed after a scuffle, he is told he matches the description of a deserter; the more he explains, the less the stationmaster believes him.</p></details><details><summary><b>123</b> · <i>The Arrest Of Lieutenant Golightly</i> — Held by people far beneath him who take him for a fraud, a man tries to carry it off lightly and is silenced.</summary><p class="sum">At the next station he is handed to a corporal who calls him a disgrace to the service and tells him to hold his tongue.</p></details><details><summary><b>143</b> · <i>His Wedded Wife</i> — Accused in front of his superior and colleagues by a stranger who knows his whole past, a man protests that he has no wife.</summary><p class="sum">The colonel demands an explanation; the man swears he never had a wife; in the mess she tells of their marriage and knows all about his people.</p></details><details><summary><b>144</b> · <i>His Wedded Wife</i> — With his fellows already convicting him on appearances, an accused man watches his accuser produce what looks like proof.</summary><p class="sum">The officers&#x27; wives have already convicted him; she names a tattoo on his shoulder, and when a major asks for her certificate she produces a paper for him to read aloud.</p></details><details><summary><b>220</b> · <i>The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case</i> — Accused of an affair on bought evidence, a man knows that even an acquittal on doubt will blacken his name for his whole career.</summary><p class="sum">He brings a criminal charge against a man who had been attentive to his wife, resting on servants&#x27; evidence; two-thirds of the station believe it, and the accused knows even acquittal on doubt will blacken him.</p></details></section><section><h2>G16 · A lie to spare them</h2>
<p class="pred">The truth would hurt someone badly, and a careful lie would spare them, if you can keep it up.</p>
<p class="meta">A person holding a painful truth wants to spare someone from the one who would be hurt. · 10 scenes from 4 stories
(Lispeth, Thrown Away, The Other Man, A Bank Fraud) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Tell the lie, and build it so it will hold. <span class='src'>from scene 23</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.deceived +</code> <code>flags.kind_lie set</code></li><li>Keep the pretence up to the very end, at your own cost. <span class='src'>from scene 175</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.deceived +</code> <code>flags.kind_lie set</code></li><li>Tell the comforting lie that spares you a scene. <span class='src'>from scene 4</span><br><code>relationships.deceived risk</code> <code>flags.kind_lie set</code></li><li>Admit the lie when they find you out. <span class='src'>from scene 6</span><br><code>relationships.deceived -</code></li><li>Tell the truth gently, and bear what follows. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.deceived -</code> <code>standing +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>4</b> · <i>Lispeth</i> — Someone responsible for a young woman, wanting to avoid a scene, has a departing guest promise a marriage he never intends.</summary><p class="sum">To avoid a scene, the chaplain&#x27;s wife tells the traveller to promise he will come back and marry her, and he promises all the way up the hill.</p></details><details><summary><b>5</b> · <i>Lispeth</i> — A young woman waits for a promised return, while the people around her keep up a comforting lie to keep her quiet.</summary><p class="sum">She waits and is told he will return; he has sailed home and forgotten her entirely.</p></details><details><summary><b>6</b> · <i>Lispeth</i> — Told at last that the people she trusted lied to keep her quiet, a young woman renounces them all and walks out for good.</summary><p class="sum">When her temper frays, the chaplain&#x27;s wife admits the promise was a lie to keep her quiet; the girl renounces them and goes back to her own people.</p></details><details><summary><b>22</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — Holding a dead man&#x27;s letters that would break his family&#x27;s hearts, two witnesses decide to replace the truth with a kind lie.</summary><p class="sum">The letters would break his parents&#x27; hearts, so the narrator proposes they say he died of cholera with them at his side.</p></details><details><summary><b>23</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — Two witnesses forge a comforting account of a young man&#x27;s death, down to the keepsakes his grieving family will expect to receive.</summary><p class="sum">They draft a glowing false account of his death, strip his keepsakes, and cut a lock of the senior officer&#x27;s hair to send as his.</p></details><details><summary><b>25</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — Two companions rehearse their false account until it holds, then report it to the one in charge, feeling like criminals.</summary><p class="sum">They rehearse the story all day; the senior officer admits he once came close to the same end; they report the death to the commanding officer.</p></details><details><summary><b>91</b> · <i>The Other Man</i> — A bystander invents a cover story to protect a woman&#x27;s reputation, and she never mentions the meeting or her loss again.</summary><p class="sum">He tells the doctor she fell from her horse; she never speaks of that night, drifts about expecting someone, and dies at home two years later.</p></details><details><summary><b>173</b> · <i>A Bank Fraud</i> — Told a difficult subordinate is dying, the one in charge intercepts his dismissal and decides to deceive him kindly to the end.</summary><p class="sum">The doctor says the accountant has three months to live; that evening a letter from the directors dismisses him; the manager hides it and plans a merciful fraud.</p></details><details><summary><b>175</b> · <i>A Bank Fraud</i> — A superior secretly pays a dying subordinate&#x27;s salary from his own pocket, and forges praise from above to keep him hopeful.</summary><p class="sum">When the new accountant arrives the manager hides him at the club, pays the sick man&#x27;s salary from his own pocket, and forges letters from the directors; the strain wears him down.</p></details><details><summary><b>176</b> · <i>A Bank Fraud</i> — Kept going by forged praise and an invented promotion, a difficult subordinate dies believing that those above him valued him.</summary><p class="sum">To keep him interested in life the manager invents a rise in salary; the accountant dies believing he would have done great things for the bank.</p></details></section><section><h2>G17 · Getting even by a trick</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone who has wronged or tormented you has a weakness you could use, and a clever trick would pay them back in full.</p>
<p class="meta">A person with a score to settle wants to get even without being caught from the one who wronged them. · 9 scenes from 4 stories
(Watches Of The Night, His Wedded Wife, Pig, The Rout Of The White Hussars) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Bet them you will get your own back, and wait. <span class='src'>from scene 140</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.tormentor risk</code></li><li>Pretend to submit while you plan. <span class='src'>from scene 207</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.superior +</code> <code>flags.plotting set</code></li><li>Use the system itself to bury them in work. <span class='src'>from scene 198</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.rival -</code> <code>flags.vendetta set</code></li><li>Hand them something that will torment them, and never explain. <span class='src'>from scene 81</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.rival -</code> <code>flags.vendetta set</code></li><li>Let it go. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>relationships.rival +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>81</b> · <i>Watches Of The Night</i> — Handed a harmless mix-up that could torment a notorious gossip, a woman she has wronged sends it on and resolves never to explain.</summary><p class="sum">The lawn&#x27;s owner, whom the colonel&#x27;s wife hates, finds the watch, hears the truth, and sends it to the wife with a pointed note, vowing never to explain.</p></details><details><summary><b>85</b> · <i>Watches Of The Night</i> — A junior who knows a joke has gone too far wants to confess, but the one running it insists the victim must suffer.</summary><p class="sum">The young officer wants to tell the truth, but the woman refuses; he lets it drop and moves away, and the couple remain wretched.</p></details><details><summary><b>140</b> · <i>His Wedded Wife</i> — Tormented by a senior who never knows when to stop, a quiet newcomer calmly wagers that he will turn the tables one day.</summary><p class="sum">The others let him be, but the senior subaltern, soured by waiting for promotion, keeps up a coarse hoax; the newcomer calmly bets him a month&#x27;s pay he will play a sell on him he will never forget.</p></details><details><summary><b>145</b> · <i>His Wedded Wife</i> — The damning proof turns out to be a joke by the junior he tormented, who has won their wager in full.</summary><p class="sum">The paper is a receipt certifying that the newcomer has paid his debts and won the wager; the woman has fled.</p></details><details><summary><b>195</b> · <i>Pig</i> — Sold a dangerous bargain by a colleague who laughs it off, a man vows to make him pay for it if it takes years.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, one young official sells another a vicious horse that nearly kills him; the seller laughs it off, and the buyer vows to get even if it takes five years.</p></details><details><summary><b>198</b> · <i>Pig</i> — Through an official request, a rival is ordered to supply you with information, and he eagerly walks into the trap you set.</summary><p class="sum">The vengeful man proposes a scheme to feed the army on pig and has the government order his rival to supply information; the rival, flattered, begins with an essay on the primitive pig.</p></details><details><summary><b>203</b> · <i>Pig</i> — Publicly mocked for work extracted by a false request, a man confronts the colleague who set him up and gets only false sympathy.</summary><p class="sum">The vengeful man sends the rival&#x27;s letter and essay to a newspaper that mocks him; shaken and ridiculed, the rival confronts him and gets only mild sympathy.</p></details><details><summary><b>207</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — A superior who knows he blundered cannot admit it, while a quietly defiant junior pretends to submit and plots his reply.</summary><p class="sum">A subaltern buys the drum-horse at the sale; when the colonel is angry he feigns submission and promises to shoot it; the colonel, who knows he erred but cannot admit it, is soothed; the subaltern and a friend quietly prepare something.</p></details><details><summary><b>213</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — A furious superior exposes a hoax with his own hands, and curses his people for being frightened of nothing at all.</summary><p class="sum">The horse trots up to the mess for bread; the colonel finds it alive, the drums made of paper, and wrenches off the wired skeleton, cursing the band as cowards.</p></details></section><section><h2>G18 · It fell into your hands</h2>
<p class="pred">By accident you have come into something not meant for you, a secret or an advantage, and you could turn it to your own ends.</p>
<p class="meta">A person with an accidental advantage wants to profit by it from those it was meant for. · 5 scenes from 3 stories
(Consequences, The Broken Link Handicapped, The Bisara Of Pooree) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Use it to get what you want. <span class='src'>from scene 97</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>standing +</code> <code>flags.used_a_secret set</code></li><li>Keep it to yourself until the moment comes. <span class='src'>from scene 150</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>money +</code></li><li>Take it, and take your chance. <span class='src'>from scene 235</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.stolen set</code></li><li>Hand it back to its owner. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.owner +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>96</b> · <i>Consequences</i> — Through a careless mistake, confidential papers meant for someone else land in the hands of a clever outsider.</summary><p class="sum">A packet of confidential state papers, badly addressed, is delivered by a careless messenger to the society woman, who tears it open.</p></details><details><summary><b>97</b> · <i>Consequences</i> — Holding confidential papers they were never meant to see, a clever pair work out how best to use them for advancement.</summary><p class="sum">She reads the secret papers and sees their value; the young officer arrives, they study them together, and he decides to aim at the intelligence or foreign departments.</p></details><details><summary><b>150</b> · <i>The Broken Link Handicapped</i> — A rival quietly discovers a hidden quirk of the ground everyone competes on, and keeps the knowledge entirely to himself.</summary><p class="sum">A rival owner discovers by chance a spot on one course where a spoken voice echoes from brick mounds by the track, and keeps it to himself.</p></details><details><summary><b>234</b> · <i>The Bisara Of Pooree</i> — Grumbling about a run of bad luck, a man hears a half-joking explanation, while a desperate rival overhears every word.</summary><p class="sum">The collector grumbles at the club about his run of bad luck; the man who knew tells him the charm&#x27;s story half in jest; the infatuated officer, lunching unseen beyond the arch, hears every word.</p></details><details><summary><b>235</b> · <i>The Bisara Of Pooree</i> — A desperate suitor steals a colleague&#x27;s prized possession, and within days the woman who despised him accepts his proposal.</summary><p class="sum">The infatuated officer calls while the collector is out and steals the box; three days later the young woman astonishes everyone by accepting him.</p></details></section><section><h2>G19 · Saving them from themselves</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone is heading for ruin without seeing it, and you could step in behind their back and steer them off it.</p>
<p class="meta">A onlooker wants to save someone from their own folly from someone who does not want saving. · 6 scenes from 5 stories
(Thrown Away, False Dawn, The Rescue Of Pluffles, Kidnapped, The Bisara Of Pooree) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Win their trust with kindness, then talk sense into them. <span class='src'>from scene 62</span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>relationships.protege +</code></li><li>Take matters into your own hands, by force if need be. <span class='src'>from scene 115</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.protege risk</code> <code>flags.meddled set</code></li><li>Drop everything and go after them now. <span class='src'>from scene 19</span><br><code>relationships.protege +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Search their things for proof, and risk being the thief yourself. <span class='src'>from scene 236</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Mind your own business. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>relationships.protege -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>19</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — A senior colleague senses that a troubled young man has gone off to harm himself, and recruits a companion who can lie.</summary><p class="sum">A woman&#x27;s cruel remark tips him over; he goes off alone to shoot, and a senior officer who had tried to check him guesses the truth and recruits the narrator.</p></details><details><summary><b>52</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — A bystander impulsively takes charge of someone else&#x27;s romantic blunder, sending the man to explain while he fetches the other woman.</summary><p class="sum">Overexcited, the narrator takes charge, tells the suitor to stay and explain himself, and goes to fetch the younger sister.</p></details><details><summary><b>53</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — A bystander chases a heartbroken woman across dangerous ground in the dark, trying to bring her back to hear something.</summary><p class="sum">He chases her across dangerous ground through the tail of the storm while she shouts at him to go away.</p></details><details><summary><b>62</b> · <i>The Rescue Of Pluffles</i> — Someone older and wiser gently takes the conceit out of a foolish young man and talks him back toward his promised marriage.</summary><p class="sum">Speaking like a mother, she gently takes the conceit out of him and paints a picture of the marriage that would be the making of him.</p></details><details><summary><b>115</b> · <i>Kidnapped</i> — Argument only hardens a young man&#x27;s resolve on a ruinous match, so a clever meddler devises a plan to stop it by other means.</summary><p class="sum">Argument only fixes him in his purpose; the clever society woman attends a council of three men on his case and proposes a plan.</p></details><details><summary><b>236</b> · <i>The Bisara Of Pooree</i> — Convinced a rival won by theft, two men decide to search his belongings, knowing that if they are wrong they are the thieves.</summary><p class="sum">The man who knew persuades the collector, whose luck has turned, to burgle the suitor&#x27;s hotel room during a dance; they find the box under his papers.</p></details></section><section><h2>G20 · Swallowing it from someone above</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone with power over you orders you about like a dog, and everything you want depends on swallowing it.</p>
<p class="meta">A person held down wants to keep their place without losing themselves from someone above them. · 5 scenes from 3 stories
(Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais, The Rescue Of Pluffles, His Chance In Life) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Hold your tongue, and do as you are told. <span class='src'>from scene 31</span><br><code>relationships.superior +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Fetch and carry, hoping to be noticed. <span class='src'>from scene 58</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.superior +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Lose your temper and tell them what you think. <span class='src'>from scene 33</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>relationships.superior -</code> <code>flags.gave_self_away set</code></li><li>Look for somewhere else to go. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.superior -</code> <code>money risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>31</b> · <i>Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais</i> — Disguised far below his real place, a man must swallow insults from people he outranks and watch others flirt with the woman he loves.</summary><p class="sum">The mother praises her paragon groom; he must endure being slanged by men he outranks, even one he recruited, and watch others flirt with her.</p></details><details><summary><b>33</b> · <i>Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais</i> — A powerful older man presses unwelcome attentions on the woman you love, and your disguise depends on holding your tongue.</summary><p class="sum">A distinguished old man flirts offensively with her; the disguised lover seizes his bridle and threatens him, giving himself away.</p></details><details><summary><b>57</b> · <i>The Rescue Of Pluffles</i> — A callow, wealthy young man who prides himself on his own judgment is quietly captured by a heartless, calculating older woman.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, a callow rich young officer who prides himself on trusting his own judgment falls under the control of a heartless, businesslike woman.</p></details><details><summary><b>58</b> · <i>The Rescue Of Pluffles</i> — A young man infatuated with someone older fetches, waits and pays for the privilege of being ordered about like a dog.</summary><p class="sum">She and the narrator&#x27;s clever friend detest each other; the woman breaks the young man in to fetch, wait and pay, and treats him like a servant.</p></details><details><summary><b>71</b> · <i>His Chance In Life</i> — A temporary helper is judged careless by the one she works for, who never considers that she has a life of her own.</summary><p class="sum">A plain young woman works as a temporary children&#x27;s nurse for a lady who calls her dirty and inattentive and never considers she has a life of her own.</p></details></section><section><h2>G21 · Seeing it, and saying nothing</h2>
<p class="pred">You can see plainly that something is wrong in front of you, and saying so would cost you or someone else more than silence.</p>
<p class="meta">A onlooker wants to do right without making it worse from the one doing wrong. · 5 scenes from 4 stories
(False Dawn, The House Of Suddhoo, The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case, The Bisara Of Pooree) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Keep quiet, so as not to spoil things. <span class='src'>from scene 48</span><br><code>relationships.company +</code> <code>flags.kept_silent set</code></li><li>Say nothing, but keep well clear of it. <span class='src'>from scene 232</span><br><code>tact +</code></li><li>Go along with it, afraid of what they could do to you. <span class='src'>from scene 136</span><br><code>relationships.wrongdoer +</code> <code>flags.kept_silent set</code></li><li>Bring in someone with the power to stop it. <span class='src'>from scene 221 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.authority +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Speak up, whatever it costs. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>relationships.wrongdoer -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>48</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — An onlooker sees trouble gathering during a well-managed gathering and keeps quiet rather than spoil everyone&#x27;s evening.</summary><p class="sum">On the ride out the narrator sees a dust-storm gathering but says nothing to spoil the well-managed party.</p></details><details><summary><b>136</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — Someone who could expose a fraud dares not, because she is in debt to its backers, and she wanted the victim&#x27;s money herself.</summary><p class="sum">She explains she dare not expose the fraud: she is in debt to the moneylender, the trickster&#x27;s friend, who could poison her; and she had hoped to get the old man&#x27;s money herself.</p></details><details><summary><b>138</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — Having lent your name to a fraud without meaning to, you can neither expose it nor stop it, and fear worse is coming.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator is helpless: he has seemed to abet the fraud, has no witnesses, cannot act without endangering the woman, and fears she will poison the trickster.</p></details><details><summary><b>219</b> · <i>The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case</i> — A husband humiliates his wife and small child in front of guests, who sit angry and uncomfortable and say nothing.</summary><p class="sum">At dinner he gives their small son wine until he cries and is removed, then sends his wife from the table while the guests sit angry and helpless.</p></details><details><summary><b>232</b> · <i>The Bisara Of Pooree</i> — A man recognises a dangerous object in a colleague&#x27;s collection and says nothing, knowing any share in it is risky.</summary><p class="sum">Unless stolen it turns on its owner within three years; a young official bought it as a curiosity without knowing, and a man who recognised it said nothing.</p></details></section><section><h2>G22 · Belonging to neither side</h2>
<p class="pred">You have crossed into a world your own circle looks down on, and now you belong fully to neither.</p>
<p class="meta">A person between two worlds wants a place of their own from both sides. · 6 scenes from 5 stories
(Lispeth, Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais, Yoked With An Unbeliever, Beyond The Pale, To Be Held For Reference) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Go back to where you came from, and burn the bridge. <span class='src'>from scene 6 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.own_circle -</code> <code>flags.went_back set</code></li><li>Keep your two lives strictly apart. <span class='src'>from scene 159 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.double_life set</code></li><li>Live openly on the other side, and ask nobody for anything. <span class='src'>from scene 278</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.own_circle -</code></li><li>Put what you have learned to use for your own side. <span class='src'>from scene 28</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>0</b> · <i>Lispeth</i> — A young woman taken in by a household not her own belongs fully neither to them nor to the people she came from.</summary><p class="sum">After a verse epigraph, an orphaned girl from a hill village is raised by the chaplain&#x27;s wife as half-servant, half-companion, and grows very beautiful.</p></details><details><summary><b>28</b> · <i>Miss Youghal&#x27;S Sais</i> — A man who masters what his superiors think beneath notice is written off as odd, and his hard-won knowledge counts for nothing.</summary><p class="sum">The policeman spends seven years learning the underworld, its dances, cant and secret societies, and respectable people write him off as odd.</p></details><details><summary><b>41</b> · <i>Yoked With An Unbeliever</i> — A man who has let himself drift at a distant post drops his old ties one by one and stops meaning to return.</summary><p class="sum">Living comfortably and saving nothing, he drops his correspondents at home one by one and meets a shrewd, handsome young woman.</p></details><details><summary><b>155</b> · <i>Beyond The Pale</i> — A man who knows too much about a world his own circle keeps apart from wanders somewhere he should never have gone.</summary><p class="sum">After a proverb and the narrator&#x27;s warning to keep to one&#x27;s own kind, a man who knows too much of the city&#x27;s hidden life strays into a blind alley below the grated window of a lonely young widow.</p></details><details><summary><b>277</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — Someone who has cut every tie with his own class lives openly outside it, and wants neither pity nor notice from anyone.</summary><p class="sum">His companion scolds him; the narrator learns he is thirty-five though he looks fifty, and has cut himself off from his own people entirely and wants no notice.</p></details><details><summary><b>278</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — A fallen man accepts your friendship only on equal terms, and understands perfectly why you can visit him only after dark.</summary><p class="sum">He refuses charity, accepts only tobacco and books, and agrees the narrator must visit him only after dark, saying he would have done the same in his days of standing.</p></details></section><section><h2>G23 · Not free to love them</h2>
<p class="pred">You love someone who is not free, or you are not, and every meeting risks a scandal your world will not forgive.</p>
<p class="meta">A lover wants to be near them from someone bound elsewhere. · 6 scenes from 3 stories
(Lispeth, Beyond The Pale, On The Strength Of A Likeness) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Meet in secret, and keep it hidden. <span class='src'>from scene 157</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.secret_affair set</code></li><li>Enjoy their company and tell yourself it means nothing. <span class='src'>from scene 3</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>flags.led_on set</code></li><li>Say goodbye, and mean never to see them again. <span class='src'>from scene 261</span><br><code>relationships.beloved -</code> <code>standing +</code></li><li>Tell them plainly how you feel. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.beloved risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>3</b> · <i>Lispeth</i> — A guest who is promised to someone else enjoys a young woman&#x27;s devotion while he recovers, though it means nothing to him.</summary><p class="sum">The recovering traveller, engaged to a girl at home, laughs at her feelings but enjoys her company and pet names while he convalesces.</p></details><details><summary><b>157</b> · <i>Beyond The Pale</i> — A man decodes a secret summons to a forbidden meeting and goes to it that very night in disguise.</summary><p class="sum">He decodes the objects as a summons from the widow for eleven o&#x27;clock, and that night goes to the alley disguised in a woman&#x27;s cloak.</p></details><details><summary><b>159</b> · <i>Beyond The Pale</i> — Leading a respectable life by day and a forbidden one by night, a man never stops to consider what discovery would cost.</summary><p class="sum">By day he does his office work and pays calls; by night he visits her, delighted by her; he never considers who her guardian is or why he is not discovered and killed.</p></details><details><summary><b>256</b> · <i>On The Strength Of A Likeness</i> — A man meets a married woman who is the image of his lost love, and befriends her to relive the past.</summary><p class="sum">He sees in a passing rickshaw the living image of his old love, a married woman visiting for the season, and decides to get to know her and pretend for a while.</p></details><details><summary><b>260</b> · <i>On The Strength Of A Likeness</i> — A man realises he has fallen for a good, married woman he began courting only as a likeness, and curses his own folly.</summary><p class="sum">Her husband is transferred and she stays a week in the young man&#x27;s station; he realises he has fallen for her, an honest married woman, and curses his folly.</p></details><details><summary><b>261</b> · <i>On The Strength Of A Likeness</i> — Loving a married woman who treats him kindly as a mere stand-in, a man parts from her hoping never to see her again.</summary><p class="sum">She gently turns aside his remarks and thanks him as one who knows it was all for the likeness; at the station he tells her he hopes never to see her face again, and she understands.</p></details></section><section><h2>G24 · Devoted to someone who does not care</h2>
<p class="pred">You have given your devotion to someone who takes it as their due, and everyone but you can see they do not care.</p>
<p class="meta">A devoted admirer wants to matter to them from someone who does not care. · 5 scenes from 4 stories
(In Error, Venus Annodomini, The Bisara Of Pooree, Wressley Of The Foreign Office) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Pour your best work into a gift for them. <span class='src'>from scene 266 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.idol risk</code> <code>flags.devoted set</code></li><li>Worship from a distance, and ask nothing. <span class='src'>from scene 165 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.idol +</code> <code>flags.devoted set</code></li><li>Press harder for their attention. <span class='src'>from scene 227</span><br><code>relationships.idol -</code> <code>relationships.colleagues -</code></li><li>See them as they are, and walk away. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.idol -</code> <code>standing +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>164</b> · <i>In Error</i> — Fresh from years of isolation, a man cannot judge who is who, and idealises a cold, worthless person as a paragon.</summary><p class="sum">Called to the hill capital to try for a vacant post, the nervous, handsome man cannot judge who is who and makes a goddess of a cold, worthless society woman.</p></details><details><summary><b>227</b> · <i>Venus Annodomini</i> — An overeager young admirer demands too much of an older woman&#x27;s attention, and she kindly but firmly holds him off.</summary><p class="sum">A very young officer adores her too earnestly and demands too much; she checks him sternly, though he reminds her of a lad who loved her twenty-three years before.</p></details><details><summary><b>233</b> · <i>The Bisara Of Pooree</i> — A small, disliked man is hopelessly infatuated with someone who despises him, and the whole community laughs at his devotion.</summary><p class="sum">A small, disliked, worthless officer is blindly infatuated with a good, tall young woman who looks on him as vermin; the whole station laughs.</p></details><details><summary><b>265</b> · <i>Wressley Of The Foreign Office</i> — A dry, overworked expert falls for a frivolous young woman who pretends interest in his work and mocks it behind his back.</summary><p class="sum">He falls suddenly in love with a frivolous, lisping girl; the station laughs; she pretends interest in his work and mocks it behind his back.</p></details><details><summary><b>268</b> · <i>Wressley Of The Foreign Office</i> — The one person a man&#x27;s life&#x27;s work was made for dismisses it unread, and he destroys it and returns to drudgery.</summary><p class="sum">She glances at it and says she did not understand it; broken, he returns to hack work and sinks the whole edition in a lake, keeping one copy that he later gives the narrator.</p></details></section><section><h2>G25 · Too late</h2>
<p class="pred">You arrive, or understand, at last, and it may already be too late to set it right.</p>
<p class="meta">A person arriving too late wants to put it right from someone past helping. · 5 scenes from 5 stories
(Thrown Away, Yoked With An Unbeliever, The Other Man, In The Pride Of His Youth, By Word Of Mouth) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Race there anyway, as fast as you can. <span class='src'>from scene 20</span><br><code>relationships.lost_one +</code> <code>money -</code></li><li>Offer everything you have, though they may no longer need it. <span class='src'>from scene 43</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.lost_one risk</code></li><li>Ask for help now, though you should have asked long ago. <span class='src'>from scene 270</span><br><code>relationships.neighbours +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Laugh at the reward that came too late, and walk away. <span class='src'>from scene 194</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>flags.walked_out set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>20</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — Racing to reach a despairing young man in time, two companions arrive at his door and sense they may already be too late.</summary><p class="sum">The two race thirty miles to the rest house and find it silent but for a lamp burning in daylight and the sound of flies.</p></details><details><summary><b>43</b> · <i>Yoked With An Unbeliever</i> — A widow sets out to claim the old sweetheart who swore eternal devotion, and finds him long since married to someone else.</summary><p class="sum">Widowed and rich, his old sweetheart rereads his letter, sets out to offer him her hand and fortune, and finds him little altered and married.</p></details><details><summary><b>89</b> · <i>The Other Man</i> — A woman waiting in the rain to meet the man she once loved finds him arriving dead, and collapses in public.</summary><p class="sum">Waiting in the rain for the coach, she finds him in it, dead, tied upright by the driver, and falls screaming into the mud.</p></details><details><summary><b>194</b> · <i>In The Pride Of His Youth</i> — Offered too late the reward that would have saved his marriage and child, a young man laughs bitterly, refuses, and vanishes.</summary><p class="sum">The sum would have saved his wife and son; he laughs uncontrollably, says he is an old man now and will retire, and is never seen again.</p></details><details><summary><b>270</b> · <i>By Word Of Mouth</i> — Having kept everyone at arm&#x27;s length, a shy man waits too long to ask for help when his wife falls dangerously ill.</summary><p class="sum">When typhoid breaks out his wife falls ill; he is too shy to ask for help for eight days, and a neighbour scolds him; the station nurses all its sick through, but she relapses and dies.</p></details></section><section><h2>G26 · An omen meant for you</h2>
<p class="pred">Something uncanny seems to be speaking to you directly, and the sensible explanation may not be the true one.</p>
<p class="meta">A person given a sign wants to know what to do from whatever sent it. · 5 scenes from 3 stories
(The House Of Suddhoo, The Bisara Of Pooree, By Word Of Mouth) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Obey it, whatever it costs. <span class='src'>from scene 274 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.followed_sign set</code></li><li>Pay whatever it asks. <span class='src'>from scene 134 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>money -</code> <code>flags.followed_sign set</code></li><li>Laugh it off as a story. <span class='src'>from scene 234 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code></li><li>Send for someone who knows how such things are done. <span class='src'>from scene 129</span><br><code>cunning +</code> <code>relationships.adviser +</code></li><li>Pass it on quietly where it can do no harm. <span class='src'>from scene 237 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>flags.rid_of_it set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>129</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — An old man asks your blessing on a costly ritual to save his son, and you begin to suspect he is being robbed.</summary><p class="sum">The old man asks whether magic is against the law; the narrator jokingly gives it his sanction, learns how much the old man has already paid, and goes to watch.</p></details><details><summary><b>231</b> · <i>The Bisara Of Pooree</i> — A charm said to win anyone&#x27;s love works only if it is stolen, and ruins whoever merely buys or finds it.</summary><p class="sum">After an incantation as epigraph, the narrator tells the history of a tiny silver box holding a carved fish, a love-charm that works only if it has been stolen.</p></details><details><summary><b>238</b> · <i>The Bisara Of Pooree</i> — Anyone who comes upon such a thing must choose between keeping it honestly and stealing it, and either may ruin them.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator challenges the doubting reader to keep such a box three years, or better, steal it and be sorry.</p></details><details><summary><b>272</b> · <i>By Word Of Mouth</i> — A frightened companion brings a grieving man a message from his dead wife, naming a distant place and a time.</summary><p class="sum">At a remote rest house the servant runs back in terror, saying he met the dead wife on the road and she sent word she would meet her husband next month at a distant town.</p></details><details><summary><b>273</b> · <i>By Word Of Mouth</i> — Just as a grieving man shrugs off a strange omen, orders arrive sending him to the very place it named.</summary><p class="sum">The doctor walks the verandah all night; back at work, he tells an old friend the story, and a telegram arrives ordering him to that very town to fight cholera.</p></details></section><section><h2>G27 · Panic in the dark</h2>
<p class="pred">Something uncanny has come at you out of the dark, and one person&#x27;s fright could carry everyone with it.</p>
<p class="meta">A frightened person wants to keep their head from whatever is out there. · 6 scenes from 3 stories
(False Dawn, The House Of Suddhoo, The Rout Of The White Hussars) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Keep still and watch until you see how it is done. <span class='src'>from scene 133</span><br><code>cunning +</code></li><li>Run with everyone else. <span class='src'>from scene 211</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.company +</code></li><li>Walk up and lay your hands on it. <span class='src'>from scene 213 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>flags.faced_it set</code></li><li>Huddle together and wait for the light. <span class='src'>from scene 49</span><br><code>relationships.company +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>49</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — A sudden storm throws a festive gathering into roaring darkness, and everyone huddles together blindly, waiting for it to pass.</summary><p class="sum">A violent dust-storm plunges the party into roaring darkness, and everyone huddles blindly by the horses.</p></details><details><summary><b>131</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — In the dark a frightened old man throws himself down as a performer begins a ritual meant to terrify him.</summary><p class="sum">The seal-cutter comes up, has the lamp put out, and a pale flame rises from a basin as the old man throws himself on the floor.</p></details><details><summary><b>132</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — A performance in the dark is so uncanny that even a sceptical onlooker feels his nerve beginning to give way.</summary><p class="sum">Stripped and eyes rolled back, the seal-cutter crawls round the basin in utter silence for ten minutes; everyone, the narrator included, is horrified.</p></details><details><summary><b>133</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — One overdone trick gives the performer away, and the frightened onlooker realises he is watching a fraud he could expose.</summary><p class="sum">The seal-cutter spouts fire from his nostrils, a trick the narrator knows, and he realises the whole business is a fraud.</p></details><details><summary><b>210</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — At the end of a punishing day, the thing a whole company believed destroyed comes back toward them in the most unsettling way.</summary><p class="sum">As the band plays at watering, the dead drum-horse comes down the road at sunset, drums draped in crape and a skeleton riding on its back.</p></details><details><summary><b>211</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — One person&#x27;s panic sets off a whole company, and they flee in disorder while those in charge are away drinking.</summary><p class="sum">One man yells and wheels; panic spreads troop by troop; the band breaks and the whole regiment stampedes while the colonel and officers are at the mess.</p></details></section><section><h2>G28 · A marriage gone cold</h2>
<p class="pred">The one you married has stopped seeing you except to mock or ignore you, and everyone around you has noticed.</p>
<p class="meta">A neglected spouse wants to be seen again from their spouse. · 5 scenes from 3 stories
(Three And--An Extra, The Other Man, The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Keep your own counsel, and plan how to win them back. <span class='src'>from scene 10 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>tact +</code> <code>relationships.spouse +</code></li><li>Bear it with a smile in front of guests. <span class='src'>from scene 219 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.spouse -</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Pour your love into your children instead. <span class='src'>from scene 218</span><br><code>relationships.children +</code> <code>relationships.spouse -</code></li><li>Tell them plainly what it is doing to you. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.spouse risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>8</b> · <i>Three And--An Extra</i> — After a shared grief, a husband drifts away from a mourning wife, and a clever, mischievous rival begins to take an interest in him.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator describes a marriage strained after a baby&#x27;s death, and the arrival of a clever, mischievous society woman.</p></details><details><summary><b>9</b> · <i>Three And--An Extra</i> — Kind friends make sure a wife hears her husband is being openly courted by a rival, and she keeps her own counsel.</summary><p class="sum">The rival annexes the husband publicly; friends make sure the grieving wife hears; she keeps her own counsel and tells him to go to a ball without her.</p></details><details><summary><b>88</b> · <i>The Other Man</i> — A neglected wife, mocked by her husband for losing her looks, learns that the man she once loved is coming, gravely ill.</summary><p class="sum">She falls ill and loses her looks; her husband mocks her plainness and neglects her; she learns her old love is coming up to the hills gravely ill.</p></details><details><summary><b>217</b> · <i>The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case</i> — A middle-aged man has grown weary of the wife he sits across from every day, and she is too quiet to resist him.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph about a husband who has come to hate his wife, the narrator introduces a coarse, grizzled, middle-aged officer and his pale, quiet, much younger wife.</p></details><details><summary><b>218</b> · <i>The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case</i> — A wife endures years of heavy, mocking jokes about her looks, her weaknesses and her love for her children.</summary><p class="sum">He torments her with years of brutal chaff about her headaches, her looks and her love for her children, and she stays devoted to him.</p></details></section><section><h2>G29 · The habit that is taking everything</h2>
<p class="pred">A private habit is slowly taking your work, your money and your people, and you keep promising yourself you will stop.</p>
<p class="meta">A person in the grip of a habit wants to stop, or to stop caring from their own habit. · 5 scenes from 3 stories
(In Error, The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows, To Be Held For Reference) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Fight it alone, week by week. <span class='src'>from scene 165</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>flags.fighting_habit set</code></li><li>Swear an oath, and never drink alone again. <span class='src'>from scene 167 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.friends +</code></li><li>Let someone else take charge of your money. <span class='src'>from scene 243 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.supplier +</code></li><li>Give in, and stop caring. <span class='src'>from scene 281</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>money -</code> <code>flags.given_up set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>165</b> · <i>In Error</i> — Believing an admired person&#x27;s influence can save him, a man struggles in secret against a vice that keeps beating him.</summary><p class="sum">His devotion is platonic; she treats him as her property; believing in her influence, he fights his secret drinking and keeps relapsing.</p></details><details><summary><b>242</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — A man who once earned a good living now lives on a small inheritance, while a habit slowly takes over everything.</summary><p class="sum">The speaker, who once earned three hundred a month on a timber contract, now lives on sixty rupees a month left by an aunt, and the habit has grown on him.</p></details><details><summary><b>245</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — A man cannot quite remember how a private experiment became the habit that cost him his wife and his work.</summary><p class="sum">He began trying the drug at home in the city; his wife seems to have died then; he found his way to the house and never left.</p></details><details><summary><b>280</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — A fallen man&#x27;s head is full of useless learning, and between binges he promises you something that will make your name.</summary><p class="sum">Drunk two days a week, he raves in Greek and German, and promises the narrator materials for a new Inferno that will make him famous.</p></details><details><summary><b>281</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — A man who has sunk as low as he can claims that feeling nothing any more is a blessing, and dares you to disagree.</summary><p class="sum">Recovering, he boasts that he can no longer feel shame or even a hangover, and insists such insensibility is enviable.</p></details></section>
<section><h2>Unassigned (103)</h2><p class="meta">Scenes that fit no situation recurring in three or more stories.</p><details><summary><b>1</b> · <i>Lispeth</i> — A young woman who fits nowhere brings home an injured stranger and announces, to her guardians&#x27; horror, that she means to marry him.</summary><p class="sum">Scorned by her own people and awkward for her guardians, she refuses to be sent away to work, then carries home an injured stranger and declares she will marry him.</p></details><details><summary><b>2</b> · <i>Lispeth</i> — Guardians lecture a young woman on what is proper, and she calmly repeats that she has chosen the man she will marry.</summary><p class="sum">The chaplain and his wife nurse the unconscious man and lecture her on propriety; she calmly repeats that he is the man she will marry.</p></details><details><summary><b>7</b> · <i>Lispeth</i> — After a deceived young woman leaves, the one who deceived her blames the girl&#x27;s nature rather than the lie that drove her away.</summary><p class="sum">She marries a man who beats her and fades into old age, while the chaplain&#x27;s wife blames her nature rather than the lie.</p></details><details><summary><b>21</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — Two companions find the young man has killed himself, and read the despairing letters he left for his family and his superior.</summary><p class="sum">The boy has shot himself; the two go through the letters he wrote to his family, his commanding officer and a girl at home.</p></details><details><summary><b>24</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — Having chosen a merciful lie, two companions destroy every trace of the truth and bury the dead man with their own hands.</summary><p class="sum">They burn the bedding, bury the body themselves, and settle how to time the story so it seems natural.</p></details><details><summary><b>26</b> · <i>Thrown Away</i> — The lie holds, the dead man is soon forgotten, and his grieving mother thanks the two who deceived her for their great kindness.</summary><p class="sum">Everyone forgets the boy within a fortnight; some blame the senior officer for denying a proper funeral; the mother writes a grateful letter.</p></details><details><summary><b>40</b> · <i>Yoked With An Unbeliever</i> — A man jilted by a sweetheart he had half forgotten writes a grand letter of eternal devotion that he does not really feel.</summary><p class="sum">He writes an eight-page letter of eternal constancy that he half feels for two days; she cries over it and keeps it.</p></details><details><summary><b>42</b> · <i>Yoked With An Unbeliever</i> — A weak man settles down by marrying a shrewd, capable woman who manages him kindly and knows his failings exactly.</summary><p class="sum">He marries her and settles down; she knows his weaknesses and manages him tenderly.</p></details><details><summary><b>46</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — As the season closes and a suitor still says nothing, two hopeful sisters grow strained and sharp with the waiting.</summary><p class="sum">As the hot weather nears and he still says nothing, both sisters grow strained, one more acid and the other less winning.</p></details><details><summary><b>47</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — Everyone in a small society knows a proposal is planned for one particular evening, and gathers to watch it happen.</summary><p class="sum">He gives a moonlight riding picnic, and the whole small station knows he means to propose there.</p></details><details><summary><b>50</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — In the confusion a man realises he has proposed to the wrong woman, and turns to a near-stranger for help.</summary><p class="sum">The younger sister begs to be taken home; then the suitor grabs the narrator and shouts that he has proposed to the wrong sister.</p></details><details><summary><b>51</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — A man must undo a proposal to one sister, who is radiant with happiness, while the one he truly loves flees in tears.</summary><p class="sum">He insists he loved the younger sister all along; the elder comes up radiant and takes his arm while the younger mounts and rides away.</p></details><details><summary><b>54</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — A near-stranger must persuade a distraught woman to come back and hear a declaration he cannot bring himself to make for her.</summary><p class="sum">Her horse goes lame; she begs to be let alone, and he tells her awkwardly that the suitor has something to say to her.</p></details><details><summary><b>56</b> · <i>False Dawn</i> — After a night of upheaval, a bystander escorts home the jilted sister, and everyone quietly agrees to treat the night as forgotten.</summary><p class="sum">The party rides home in pairs, the narrator escorting the elder sister, and everyone drops back into ordinary life.</p></details><details><summary><b>61</b> · <i>The Rescue Of Pluffles</i> — Won over by kindness, a young man confides that he means to drop his engagement as a piece of youthful folly.</summary><p class="sum">Treated kindly instead of used, the young man comes over to her and speaks of his engagement as a piece of boyish folly.</p></details><details><summary><b>63</b> · <i>The Rescue Of Pluffles</i> — Having steered a foolish young man safely to his marriage, his protector advises him to leave a life he is plainly unfit for.</summary><p class="sum">She keeps him under her wing until the wedding and helps with his debts; he takes her advice, leaves the service and goes home to farm.</p></details><details><summary><b>65</b> · <i>Cupid&#x27;S Arrows</i> — A powerful suitor spends lavishly and holds great influence, while the young woman he wants is admired for her one great skill.</summary><p class="sum">The suitor entertains lavishly and wields great influence; archery is the fashion, and the girl is the best lady archer in the hills.</p></details><details><summary><b>70</b> · <i>His Chance In Life</i> — People on the margins of a rigid social order guard small distinctions fiercely, and outsiders give offence without knowing how.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator describes, with the prejudice of his day, a poor community of mixed descent living on the margins of colonial society.</p></details><details><summary><b>72</b> · <i>His Chance In Life</i> — A poor young man with a humble but secure post courts a proud family who value his position more than his background.</summary><p class="sum">She squabbles with her mother over money; a sickly, proud young telegraph signaller courts her, and his government post makes her mother lenient.</p></details><details><summary><b>74</b> · <i>His Chance In Life</i> — Posted alone to a forgotten outpost, a junior man hears that disorder is breaking out while everyone in authority is away.</summary><p class="sum">At a forgotten coastal office, with the senior officials long absent, a riot breaks out and spreads through the town.</p></details><details><summary><b>75</b> · <i>His Chance In Life</i> — With everyone in charge absent and frightened men asking for orders, a lowly junior takes command of a crisis himself.</summary><p class="sum">His colleague flees, the local police ask him for orders, and though terrified he leads them out, fires on the mob and scatters it.</p></details><details><summary><b>76</b> · <i>His Chance In Life</i> — Having acted far beyond his authority, a junior faces down an offended rival authority, then breaks down in front of his real superior.</summary><p class="sum">Town elders relay the local magistrate&#x27;s complaint that he acted unconstitutionally; he faces them down, but breaks into tears when the young official arrives next morning.</p></details><details><summary><b>78</b> · <i>Watches Of The Night</i> — A junior and his superior hurriedly pick up each other&#x27;s identical belongings, a small mix-up that will soon grow out of control.</summary><p class="sum">After a proverb, a poor young officer and his colonel, dressing in a hurry at the club, each pick up the other&#x27;s identical cheap watch.</p></details><details><summary><b>101</b> · <i>The Conversion Of Aurelian Mcgoggin</i> — In a place built on strict hierarchy, a newcomer&#x27;s theory that nobody stands above anyone is taken as an attack on the whole order.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator argues that where every man has someone set over him, a creed denying anyone at the head of affairs cannot survive.</p></details><details><summary><b>107</b> · <i>A Germ Destroyer</i> — An obsessive outsider with one idea arrives convinced a clique is blocking him, and determined to reach the person at the top.</summary><p class="sum">People complain of too much secretary and too little viceroy; meanwhile a cranky inventor with a cholera fumigant arrives, convinced a medical ring is against him.</p></details><details><summary><b>112</b> · <i>Kidnapped</i> — Those who arrange marriages for the young claim to know better than the lovers, who cannot see straight when they choose.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator argues that marriages arranged by mature, discreet people are sounder than love matches, since lovers cannot see straight.</p></details><details><summary><b>117</b> · <i>Kidnapped</i> — Brought back after a forced absence, a young man faces his jilted bride&#x27;s furious family and quietly lets the match die.</summary><p class="sum">The bride&#x27;s father comes raging and shows his coarseness; the young man keeps quiet, the girl refuses to sue and marries someone else, and he returns to his career and a suitable future match.</p></details><details><summary><b>118</b> · <i>The Arrest Of Lieutenant Golightly</i> — A vain young man who prides himself on always looking the part cuts his return from leave as fine as he dares.</summary><p class="sum">After a soldier&#x27;s anecdote as epigraph, a vain young officer who prides himself on looking like an officer and a gentleman rides down from the hills at the very end of his leave.</p></details><details><summary><b>119</b> · <i>The Arrest Of Lieutenant Golightly</i> — Setting off in his finest clothes with almost no money, a man who prides himself on organisation is caught in a downpour.</summary><p class="sum">Dressed in a new suit and white helmet, he leaves his money at the hotel and sends his servants ahead; a monsoon downpour begins.</p></details><details><summary><b>120</b> · <i>The Arrest Of Lieutenant Golightly</i> — Mile by mile, rain and mud strip a proud man of every mark of his respectability until he looks like a vagrant.</summary><p class="sum">He is thrown by a pony, his helmet dissolves into pulp, and the cheap dyes of his clothes run in every colour down his body.</p></details><details><summary><b>121</b> · <i>The Arrest Of Lieutenant Golightly</i> — Filthy and penniless, a man asks for what he is owed, and those in charge take him for the fugitive they seek.</summary><p class="sum">At the railway station, with six annas to his name and no servants, he asks for a ticket; the staff telegraph for authority and then seize him.</p></details><details><summary><b>124</b> · <i>The Arrest Of Lieutenant Golightly</i> — Losing his temper in custody, a wrongly held man tries to run, is knocked down, and is found so by someone he knows.</summary><p class="sum">His swearing wins the soldiers&#x27; admiration, but he tries to run, is knocked down with his shirt torn off, just as one of his own senior officers arrives.</p></details><details><summary><b>126</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — A traveller is warned that a single step off the familiar road leads into a strange, dark world with its own powers.</summary><p class="sum">The verse epigraph alone: a step off the well-ordered road leads into an old land where spirits and powers of darkness keep company with travellers.</p></details><details><summary><b>128</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — A clever trickster exploits an old man&#x27;s fear for his sick son, and the old man sends for his influential friend.</summary><p class="sum">The sham seal-cutter exploits the old man&#x27;s fear for his sick son by arranging daily telegrams of the son&#x27;s health; the old man sends for the narrator.</p></details><details><summary><b>130</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — Watching an old man being fleeced in the dark, you learn that someone under that roof already knows it is a fraud.</summary><p class="sum">At the darkened house one of the women whispers that the ritual is a trick to get the old man&#x27;s money; the narrator hides in a window recess.</p></details><details><summary><b>134</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — The trickster&#x27;s performance ends by demanding double payment to save the old man&#x27;s son, and the victim is ready to pay.</summary><p class="sum">A shrivelled head appears in the basin and speaks by ventriloquism, reporting the son&#x27;s illness and demanding that the fee be doubled.</p></details><details><summary><b>135</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — The trickster slips away, the frightened victim wails that he cannot pay more, and a shrewd onlooker coolly declares it all a sham.</summary><p class="sum">The woman mutters that it is a fake; the seal-cutter vanishes with his props; the old man wails that he cannot raise more, and the woman calmly calls it a sham.</p></details><details><summary><b>137</b> · <i>The House Of Suddhoo</i> — A frightened old man wanted your presence only as proof he was not breaking any rule, while a trickster runs his life.</summary><p class="sum">She says the old man brought the narrator only to be sure he was not breaking the law, and that the trickster has forbidden him to visit his son.</p></details><details><summary><b>141</b> · <i>His Wedded Wife</i> — Just as a tormentor is boasting of his engagement before everyone, a stranger appears out of the dark claiming to be his wife.</summary><p class="sum">The senior subaltern gets his promotion and an engagement; one night, as he boasts of his fiancee to the mess and the officers&#x27; wives, a woman&#x27;s voice asks for her husband.</p></details><details><summary><b>142</b> · <i>His Wedded Wife</i> — A lovely stranger publicly claims a man as her husband, and everyone around him is ready to believe the worst.</summary><p class="sum">A lovely, travel-worn woman throws her arms round him, calling him her darling and begging forgiveness for coming out, while everyone expects the worst.</p></details><details><summary><b>146</b> · <i>His Wedded Wife</i> — A mocked newcomer who pulled off a dangerous hoax is suddenly the hero of the very company that bullied him.</summary><p class="sum">They find the newcomer unlacing his stays; the mess roars, makes him president of the dramatic club, and nicknames him after the senior subaltern&#x27;s wife; the narrator calls it dangerous.</p></details><details><summary><b>147</b> · <i>The Broken Link Handicapped</i> — Someone devoted to one passion puts everything else in life second to it, for as long as the passion lasts.</summary><p class="sum">The verse epigraph alone: a rider&#x27;s song that horses and racing come first and women and wine second.</p></details><details><summary><b>148</b> · <i>The Broken Link Handicapped</i> — In a small society where everyone knows everyone, you cannot press a man for what he owes when you are fond of his wife.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator calls local racing rotten and half sham: everyone knows everyone too well to press a man for his losings when you are fond of his wife.</p></details><details><summary><b>149</b> · <i>The Broken Link Handicapped</i> — A stubborn performer wins only when nobody interferes, and the one who learns to leave it alone carries all before him.</summary><p class="sum">An ugly, cheap horse wins everything at two miles, provided his jockey sits perfectly still; his owner has taught a nervous boy to do just that.</p></details><details><summary><b>151</b> · <i>The Broken Link Handicapped</i> — A rival learns by heart the one old terror that still haunts a competitor, and quietly files it away for later.</summary><p class="sum">The champion&#x27;s jockey was nearly killed in a notorious racing disaster and tells the story, always with a dying rider&#x27;s last words; the rival knows it by heart.</p></details><details><summary><b>152</b> · <i>The Broken Link Handicapped</i> — Everyone combines to break a boastful winner, and one rival quietly lies about his own chances while the betting rises.</summary><p class="sum">Stung by the champion owner&#x27;s boasting, the district sets a handicap to break him; the rival owner enters his mare and lies about her chances.</p></details><details><summary><b>153</b> · <i>The Broken Link Handicapped</i> — At the decisive moment a rival whispers a competitor&#x27;s worst memory to him, the competitor falls apart, and the rival collects.</summary><p class="sum">During the race the rival speaks the dead rider&#x27;s words at the echo spot; the jockey screams, the horse throws him, and the rival&#x27;s mare wins him fifteen thousand.</p></details><details><summary><b>156</b> · <i>Beyond The Pale</i> — A hidden stranger answers your idle words from behind a shuttered window, then sends a secret message only you could read.</summary><p class="sum">He hears a laugh behind the grating and whispers a verse of a love song; a voice caps it; next day an old woman throws him a packet of objects that form a secret lover&#x27;s letter.</p></details><details><summary><b>158</b> · <i>Beyond The Pale</i> — A man begins a double life with a young woman kept shut away, a secret that his whole world would condemn.</summary><p class="sum">She sings of being the drudge of her father&#x27;s house; he answers; she has loosened the grating so he can climb in, and a strange double life begins.</p></details><details><summary><b>160</b> · <i>Beyond The Pale</i> — Gossip carries news of a harmless public attention to a secret partner who cannot understand it, and she demands it end.</summary><p class="sum">His attentions to a lady of his own circle are gossiped about until the news reaches the widow, who is beaten for neglecting her work, rages, and threatens to kill herself unless he drops the lady.</p></details><details><summary><b>161</b> · <i>Beyond The Pale</i> — Returning to a forbidden meeting place, a man finds his secret discovered and the one he loved horribly punished in his stead.</summary><p class="sum">She insists he go and not return; three weeks later he knocks at the grating and she holds out arms whose hands have been cut off; someone inside stabs at him, wounding him for life.</p></details><details><summary><b>162</b> · <i>Beyond The Pale</i> — A man whose secret life ended in horror can never learn what happened, and goes on being thought perfectly respectable.</summary><p class="sum">He never learns what happened or even where the house&#x27;s front door lies; the grating is walled up, and he goes on paying calls, reckoned a very decent sort of man.</p></details><details><summary><b>167</b> · <i>In Error</i> — Saved by his faith in someone who never deserved it, a man cuts off the friend who dares to laugh at that faith.</summary><p class="sum">Passed off as jungle fever, the attack is followed by his reform; he credits her influence, drops a friend who laughs at the idea, and later marries a far better woman.</p></details><details><summary><b>168</b> · <i>A Bank Fraud</i> — A capable superior keeps two faces: a carefree companion after hours and a hard man of business during them.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator introduces a bank manager who is a carefree sportsman from four to ten and a hard, shrewd man of business from ten to four.</p></details><details><summary><b>169</b> · <i>A Bank Fraud</i> — Trusted by distant people above him, someone in charge runs a busy business where knowing your clients&#x27; affairs is everything.</summary><p class="sum">The bank&#x27;s directors trust him as far as directors trust managers; his branch does complex local credit work that needs a man who knows his clients&#x27; affairs.</p></details><details><summary><b>177</b> · <i>Tod&#x27;S Amendment</i> — A fearless child who knows everyone treats the most powerful people in the land as ordinary friends to be asked for help.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator introduces a fearless six-year-old boy whom everyone in the hill capital knows, the only child ever to interrupt the supreme council.</p></details><details><summary><b>178</b> · <i>Tod&#x27;S Amendment</i> — A small child with no awe of rank asks the most powerful people present for help, and they cheerfully drop everything to give it.</summary><p class="sum">Chasing his runaway goat onto the viceroy&#x27;s lawn, he calls on the council members to help, and they leave their meeting to catch it for him; his mother smacks him.</p></details><details><summary><b>183</b> · <i>Tod&#x27;S Amendment</i> — A child pauses to translate what ordinary people told him into words that a powerful guest can understand and use.</summary><p class="sum">The boy pauses to put his thoughts in order, translating from the vernacular as the legal member helps with questions.</p></details><details><summary><b>192</b> · <i>In The Pride Of His Youth</i> — Praised by seniors for his thrift while secretly ruined, a young man learns that his distant wife has left him for another.</summary><p class="sum">Seniors praise his thrift and tell him to keep girls out of his heart; then his wife writes that she has gone off with another man.</p></details><details><summary><b>196</b> · <i>Pig</i> — A vengeful colleague studies an earnest rival&#x27;s enthusiasms, looking for a way to turn the system itself against him.</summary><p class="sum">The seller is an earnest young enthusiast for developing the province&#x27;s agriculture; the buyer watches him and boasts he will chase him till he drops.</p></details><details><summary><b>197</b> · <i>Pig</i> — In a system that answers anyone who seems earnest, a man who fakes earnestness can make endless work for others.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator explains that the government will set whole departments to answering any man who seems earnest, and that earnestness is easily faked.</p></details><details><summary><b>202</b> · <i>Pig</i> — Seizing on one careless reply, a rival complains to those above, and the exhausted victim is rebuked for failing in his duty.</summary><p class="sum">When a question seems to reopen everything, the rival writes only consult my first letter; the vengeful man complains formally; a new head rebukes the rival, who pleads for leave.</p></details><details><summary><b>204</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — A proud company that prides itself on its dignity has one humiliating episode it never wants mentioned again.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator says he once saw the proudest cavalry regiment in the country flee in terror, an incident it never wants mentioned.</p></details><details><summary><b>208</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — A whole company mourns what they believe their superior destroyed, while the few who notice signs of a trick are silenced.</summary><p class="sum">The troopers give what they think is the drum-horse a grand funeral; the farrier says it is the wrong horse and notices black paint, but is told he is drunk.</p></details><details><summary><b>209</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — To punish his people&#x27;s insolence, a vindictive superior drives them through a gruelling day meant only to make them suffer.</summary><p class="sum">In revenge the colonel drives the regiment through a gruelling field day; the narrator explains the regiment&#x27;s treasured privilege of having the band play while the horses are watered.</p></details><details><summary><b>212</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — Seeing his whole company scattered in disorder, a superior assumes they have risen against him or are all drunk.</summary><p class="sum">The colonel thinks the regiment has mutinied or is drunk; the band doubles back, and the rest of the regiment scatters across the province in the dusk.</p></details><details><summary><b>214</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — A raging superior threatens to punish everyone, while a calm deputy takes him aside to talk him out of it.</summary><p class="sum">The colonel threatens to disband and court-martial everyone; the subaltern calmly disclaims responsibility; the second-in-command takes the colonel aside.</p></details><details><summary><b>216</b> · <i>The Rout Of The White Hussars</i> — A superior who reverses his own unpopular order is cheered by his people, and his deputy assures him it costs no discipline.</summary><p class="sum">The colonel restores the drum-horse to its place and is cheered by the regiment; he worries he went back on his word, but his deputy says such things win loyalty without harming discipline.</p></details><details><summary><b>223</b> · <i>The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case</i> — The fabricated case collapses in public, and the falsely accused man takes his own quiet revenge on his accuser.</summary><p class="sum">The other witnesses flee, the accuser&#x27;s counsel throws up the case, and the accused thrashes the accuser behind the court cells.</p></details><details><summary><b>224</b> · <i>The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case</i> — After her husband&#x27;s plot collapses, a mistreated wife blames herself, forgives him, and begs society to welcome her child again.</summary><p class="sum">The wife blames herself, asks the station not to shun her or her child, and nurses her husband; the counter-charge is hushed up and they go home.</p></details><details><summary><b>225</b> · <i>Venus Annodomini</i> — Someone admired for never seeming to age goes on receiving everyone&#x27;s praise while the years pass unacknowledged.</summary><p class="sum">The verse epigraph alone: a Diana who stays forever fresh and fair while the years pass and everyone offers her praise.</p></details><details><summary><b>226</b> · <i>Venus Annodomini</i> — An admired older woman who has made youth her habit is surrounded by young admirers and never has to face her age.</summary><p class="sum">A woman of the hill capital who never seems to age has become an institution; every young man is expected to worship her, and she keeps young people about her.</p></details><details><summary><b>229</b> · <i>Venus Annodomini</i> — An infatuated young man learns the woman he adores has a grown daughter, and his father arrives already hearing the gossip.</summary><p class="sum">When he mentions his father is coming, she tells him she has a nineteen-year-old daughter arriving; his father arrives and is told at once how his son has been behaving.</p></details><details><summary><b>230</b> · <i>Venus Annodomini</i> — A young man&#x27;s father turns out to have adored the same woman long ago, and the son realises how foolish he has looked.</summary><p class="sum">The father tells him to cut his leave short; they call on her, and the father recognises her as the woman he worshipped long ago, while the son struggles to talk to her poised daughter.</p></details><details><summary><b>239</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — A dying man describes a hidden refuge that nobody could find unless they already belonged there.</summary><p class="sum">After a proverb, the narrator sets down the words of a dying friend describing a hidden opium house in a narrow city lane that no outsider could find.</p></details><details><summary><b>240</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — A shrewd host runs a quiet, respectable place for a ruinous habit, and takes a good share of everyone&#x27;s money.</summary><p class="sum">The house was opened by a one-eyed proprietor rumoured to have killed his wife; it was clean and respectable, and he never seemed touched by the drug but was very keen on money.</p></details><details><summary><b>241</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — A regular settles into his own corner of a closed circle where every newcomer is shown the same grim reminder.</summary><p class="sum">The upper room held the proprietor&#x27;s idol and his own coffin, to which every newcomer was introduced; the speaker took his mat at the coffin&#x27;s foot.</p></details><details><summary><b>243</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — Unable to work any longer, a man lets the one who supplies his habit collect his income and keep half of it.</summary><p class="sum">He can no longer work; the proprietor drew his money, gave him half to live on and kept the rest, and he did not care.</p></details><details><summary><b>244</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — A man recites how his old companions died one by one, and admits that people blamed him for his wife&#x27;s death.</summary><p class="sum">Of the ten first regulars, most are dead, sacked or murdered; he once had a wife, and people said his habit killed her.</p></details><details><summary><b>246</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — A man keeps using a gift from the one who profited from him, out of loyalty, because that one always treated him well.</summary><p class="sum">He regulates his smoking by the dragons on the pillows, and uses the silver pipe the dead proprietor gave him, for the old man&#x27;s sake.</p></details><details><summary><b>248</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — A man cannot leave a place that exploits him, because the one who holds his income might harm him and habit holds him fast.</summary><p class="sum">He cannot leave: the nephew now draws his money and might kill him, and he fears dying anywhere else; the nephew gives no credit and brags of the house.</p></details><details><summary><b>249</b> · <i>The Gate Of A Hundred Sorrows</i> — Resigned to dying where his habit has kept him, a man asks only for a little comfort and honesty at the end.</summary><p class="sum">He hopes to die in the house like a woman who died there comfortably, on a clean mat with good stuff, and asks only that the nephew stop adulterating it.</p></details><details><summary><b>250</b> · <i>The Story Of Muhammad Din</i> — Someone who works for you asks for a discarded trifle for his small son, and the child soon wanders into your rooms.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator&#x27;s household servant asks for an old polo-ball for his little son, and next day the narrator finds the child wandering in his dining-room.</p></details><details><summary><b>251</b> · <i>The Story Of Muhammad Din</i> — A small child caught where he should not be is scolded harshly by his father, and you must decide how to respond.</summary><p class="sum">Startled, the child howls; his father scolds him as a rascal bound for jail; the narrator sends word he is not angry, and the child insists he is not a rascal but a man.</p></details><details><summary><b>252</b> · <i>The Story Of Muhammad Din</i> — A small friendship grows up across a wide gap in standing, through daily greetings and a lonely child&#x27;s games.</summary><p class="sum">A formal daily greeting grows up between the narrator and the solitary child, who builds little enclosures of flowers and broken china in the garden.</p></details><details><summary><b>253</b> · <i>The Story Of Muhammad Din</i> — Having carelessly ruined a child&#x27;s work, you learn someone has told him you were angry, and must set it right.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator accidentally tramples the child&#x27;s work; someone tells the boy the master was angry; reassured, the child builds grander and grander palaces for months.</p></details><details><summary><b>254</b> · <i>The Story Of Muhammad Din</i> — A child you had grown quietly fond of falls ill and dies, and you meet his grieving father on the road.</summary><p class="sum">One day the child is missing; he has a fever; within a week the narrator meets his father carrying the small body to the burial ground.</p></details><details><summary><b>255</b> · <i>On The Strength Of A Likeness</i> — A young man at the start of his career nurses an old unrequited attachment, enjoying the gloom more than he admits.</summary><p class="sum">After a proverb, the narrator describes a rough young man who has comfortably nursed an unrequited attachment for four years to a girl long since married.</p></details><details><summary><b>257</b> · <i>On The Strength Of A Likeness</i> — A man devotes himself to someone only because she resembles another, and wilfully deceives himself about what he is doing.</summary><p class="sum">He contrives to see her constantly and deceives himself thoroughly: every look, gesture and tone is his old love&#x27;s, though her nature is entirely different.</p></details><details><summary><b>258</b> · <i>On The Strength Of A Likeness</i> — Pressed by a woman to explain his constant attentions, a man blurts out that he does not really care for her at all.</summary><p class="sum">Bored by anything about her own life, he betrays himself; she asks why he attends her when he plainly does not care for her, and he blurts that he does not.</p></details><details><summary><b>259</b> · <i>On The Strength Of A Likeness</i> — Having used a woman as a stand-in for a lost love, a man can no longer tell which of them he thinks of.</summary><p class="sum">She scornfully learns she is a lay-figure for his old love; the season ends and he goes back to work, but cannot tell which woman fills his thoughts.</p></details><details><summary><b>262</b> · <i>Wressley Of The Foreign Office</i> — Everyone in a large organisation believes their own small task is what keeps the whole machine running.</summary><p class="sum">After a ballad epigraph, the narrator observes that everyone in the service believes his own small task is the pivot on which the whole administration turns.</p></details><details><summary><b>266</b> · <i>Wressley Of The Foreign Office</i> — A man plans a great work to lay at his beloved&#x27;s feet, and she agrees to wait, mostly for his salary.</summary><p class="sum">After a month of doing his work badly, he conceives a great history to lay at her feet; she promises to wait a year, with an eye on his salary, and he takes leave.</p></details><details><summary><b>269</b> · <i>By Word Of Mouth</i> — A newly married couple shut themselves away from the small community around them, content to need nobody else.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator describes a sleepy, good-natured doctor and his wife who withdraw entirely from station society after their marriage.</p></details><details><summary><b>271</b> · <i>By Word Of Mouth</i> — Grieving, a man does his work perfectly but will not be comforted, and his colleagues gently urge him to take leave.</summary><p class="sum">He does his duties perfectly but will not be comforted; colleagues urge leave, and he goes on a walking tour with his late wife&#x27;s idle, thieving favourite servant.</p></details><details><summary><b>274</b> · <i>By Word Of Mouth</i> — Believing an order means his death, a man accepts it calmly and goes alone, while his frightened companion refuses to follow.</summary><p class="sum">He says he has not sought death but will not be sorry; the servant begs him not to go and quits; the doctor goes alone and dies there within eleven days.</p></details><details><summary><b>275</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — You meet a drunken, educated man who has fallen far from his old standing, and he talks as if he had never left it.</summary><p class="sum">After an epigraph, the narrator helps a drunken loafer singing a love song in a caravanserai, who talks of Oxford haunts as though he had never left them.</p></details><details><summary><b>276</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — A fallen man with a gentleman&#x27;s manners asks a stranger to help him home, joking elegantly about his own disgrace.</summary><p class="sum">The loafer, sobering, asks to be helped to his quarters among the horse-traders, apologising with literary flourishes for his disgrace.</p></details><details><summary><b>282</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — A fallen man counts his consolations, admitting he has already sold the thing you lent him to buy drink.</summary><p class="sum">He lists his consolations: his learning, his companion&#x27;s love and a monument he has built in seven years, admitting he sold a book the narrator lent him.</p></details><details><summary><b>283</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — A proud, destitute man refuses every gift and any charity, and sends for you only when he is dying.</summary><p class="sum">He is proud and poor, refuses every gift and the hospital, and when pneumonia takes him he sends a note asking the narrator to help him die.</p></details><details><summary><b>284</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — A dying man reveals the one great work he has secretly built through years of disgrace, and handles it like treasure.</summary><p class="sum">Dying, he drives off the doctor and has his companion bring out a bundle of manuscript, his book of what he saw and lived.</p></details><details><summary><b>285</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — A dying man hands you his life&#x27;s work and charges you not to let it die, while predicting you will mangle it.</summary><p class="sum">He bequeaths it to the narrator for his kindnesses, predicting he will mangle it, and charges him not to let it die.</p></details><details><summary><b>286</b> · <i>To Be Held For Reference</i> — After a fallen man&#x27;s death, nothing is left to say who he was except the manuscript that he entrusted to you.</summary><p class="sum">He dies murmuring a prayer and not guilty, my Lord; nothing in his room says who he was; the narrator and a friend sort and cut the papers.</p></details></section>
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