While they were still talking the old lady came out again: "Reverend father, since you have honoured our house, there is no need to refuse so hard. How many days is it now?" Tripitaka said, "Half a month already."

⚠ Half a month. He asked for one meal, agreed provisionally to a month, and fifteen days have gone. The chapter has been keeping count in the background the whole time and this is where it shows the reader the figure. ⚠ 既蒙到舍 — since you have graced our house. The word for house here is the noun, not the verb meaning to give something up. All three in this chapter are the noun, and the chapter spells the verb with a different character when it wants it. ⚠ And note who is asking. She came out once before to look at them and was sent back to the family side before the meal. Now she has come out again, into the same rooms, to argue.

The old lady said, "Let this half-month count as my squire's merit. I too have a little needlework money of my own, and I should like to feed the reverend fathers for half a month."

⚠⚠ She is dividing the ledger. The fifteen days already spent belong to her husband's account; she wants fifteen of her own. It is the most quietly startling sentence in the chapter. ⚠ 針線錢 is a wife's own money, earned by her own sewing and hers to dispose of. It occurs once in the whole novel. She is not asking her husband to extend his charity — she is proposing to buy her own, out of her own purse. ⚠ Which means she has understood the arrangement exactly. Her husband has spent twenty-four years and a fortune accumulating something, four holy men have walked into the house, and the supply is about to leave. She wants her share while it is here.

Before she had finished, Kou Dong and his brother came out too: "Four reverend gentlemen — our father has fed monks for twenty-odd years and never yet met such good men as these. Now that the number is happily complete and you four have come down to us, truly our brambles and wattle have caught the light."

⚠ 蓬蓽生輝 — the brambles and the wattle catch the light — is a set compliment for a visitor honouring a poor house, and it appears once in the whole novel. It is proper, educated, slightly overblown, and coming from two teenagers who have just run out of the study, which is exactly right. ⚠ 遇著 is the one place in this chapter where the word means a blow or an encounter that has landed — it comes after its verb, which is the test. Everywhere else in the chapter the same character is the light one that shows an action going on.

"We students are young and do not understand cause and effect, but we have often heard it said: what the husband cultivates the husband gets, what the wife cultivates the wife gets, and what is not cultivated is not got. Our father and our mother each wish to offer their celery — each of them seeking to gain a little of that fruit. Why refuse so hard?"

⚠⚠ Here is the whole economy of the chapter, quoted by a schoolboy as common knowledge. Merit is not transferable. Every person banks their own, and what you do not put in you do not get out. ⚠ That is why the mother wants her own fifteen days and the sons will want theirs. It is not competition or vanity — on this account of things, her husband's twenty-four years earn her precisely nothing. ⚠ And it flatly contradicts what Tripitaka said to Bajie two hundred and seventy-eight characters ago. He accused him of caring nothing for where the merit goes — invoking the doctrine that merit is turned outwards and given away, which is the whole point of the practice. The house is running on the opposite theory, and neither side notices. ⚠ 獻芹 — offering celery — is an old self-deprecating figure. A peasant thought celery the finest thing he had ever eaten and pressed it on his lord, who found it inedible. To offer your celery is to offer the best you have while apologising for it.

"And even we foolish brothers have put by a little of our school money, and hope to support the reverend gentlemen for half a month, and only then see you off."

⚠⚠ 省得 here means to have saved up — economised, and so to have. That is a third sense of a pairing this project's tables already carry, and the table has it wrong for this site. ⚠ Across the whole novel the same two characters do three different jobs: a linking word meaning so as to avoid, at six sites; a verb meaning to understand or be aware, at three; and this one. Nothing inside the two characters tells you which — only the sentence around them does, and that is precisely the shape this project refuses to trust a table with. ⚠ 束修 is tuition — literally a bundle of dried meat, the fee a pupil brought his teacher, from a line in the Analects about never refusing to teach anyone who came with one. So the boys are offering to spend their school fees on feeding monks. ⚠ And do the arithmetic. Fifteen days gone, fifteen more from their mother, fifteen from the sons. The family has bid the stay up to a month and a half while each of them speaks in the mildest possible terms.