君子小人 The Honest and the Otherwise
噫！有這般不遂意的事：正思忖處，只見那小二走向前，吩咐：「列位官人，仔細些，我這裡君子小人不同，各人的衣物、行李都要小心著。」噫！有这般不遂意的事：正思忖处，只见那小二走向前，吩咐：「列位官人，仔细些，我这里君子小人不同，各人的衣物、行李都要小心着。」
逐句解 Line by line
Ah!
One character, standing alone with its own exclamation mark. It is the storyteller again, and this time he is groaning on Pilgrim's behalf before the bad news arrives.
But here is the sort of thing that never goes to plan. Just as he was turning it over, up came Wang the Second and gave out: "Gentlemen, be careful. In my house the honest and the otherwise are mixed together. Every one of you look after his own clothes and baggage."
君子 against 小人 is the oldest social pair in Chinese moral vocabulary — the gentleman and the small man, and its second character takes the literary zǐ — unlike 一家子, the household on the innkeeper's doorstep, where the same character is the everyday zi. Here an innkeeper is using the pair to say, politely, that some of his guests are thieves. 著 on the end of 小心 is zhe, and it turns the phrase into a standing instruction: keep being careful.
The timing is exact and entirely at Pilgrim's expense. He has just settled on the theft and the innkeeper walks in and warns the room about theft, in the same breath, without knowing anyone is listening.
It is worth noticing what the warning is not. Nobody suspects a monk, nobody has seen the moth, nothing has gone wrong. An innkeeper doing his job properly on an ordinary evening is about to wreck the plan, and that is a far more irritating obstacle than a demon.