"Please, without rhetoric!"
"Job did not endure, but he has been more unfortunate—"
"Facts! Dry facts!" the President calls out more impatiently.
"On the eighth day he was circumcised—"
"Pray, without realism!"
"The surgeon was a quack, and he did not stanch the blood."
"Go on!"
"He was always silent," the Advocate proceeds, "even when his mother died, and he got upon his thirteenth year a stepmother ... a stepmother—a snake, a witch."
"Maybe he really means me?" Bontsie thinks to himself.