Page:Ernest Bramah - Kai Lungs Golden Hours.djvu/115

 that for official, and there being a similar balance between crowbar and books."

"Your words are like a page written in vermilion ink," exclaimed Hoa-mi, with a sideway-expressed admiration.

"Alas!" he declared, with conscious humility, "my style is meagre and almost wholly threadbare. To remedy this, each day I strive to perfect myself in the correct formation of five new written signs. When equipped with a knowledge of every one there is I shall be competent to write so striking and original an essay on any subject that it will no longer be possible to exclude my name from the list of official appointments."

"It will be a day of well-achieved triumph for the spirits of your expectant ancestors," said Hoa-mi sympathetically.

"It will also have a beneficial effect on my own material prospects," replied Lao Ting, with a commendable desire to awaken images of a more specific nature in the maiden's imagination. "Where hitherto it has been difficult to support one, there will then be a lavish profusion for two. The moment the announcement is made, my impatient feet will carry me to this spot. Can it be hoped?"

"It has long been this one's favourite resort also," confessed Hoa-mi, with every appearance of having adequately grasped Lao Ting's desired inference. "Yet to what number do the written signs in question stretch?"

"So highly favoured is our unapproachable language that the number can only be faintly conjectured. Some claim fivescore thousand different written symbols; the least exacting agree to fourscore thousand."