Even Charlotte and the girls were too much for him to-night. They were too... too... But all his drowsing brain could think of was—too rich for him.
I'm curious about what we would find by tracking the word "too" across the entire Mansfield short story corpus, mainly with word counts, word collocations, and n-grams. My hypothesis would be that the word "too" appears most frequently (perhaps exclusively) in stories with thematics of excess, both material and immaterial.
But if it had been cold in the cabin, on deck it was like ice. The sun was not up yet, but the stars were dim, and the cold pale sky was the same colour as the cold pale sea. On the land a white mist rose and fell. Now they could see quite plainly dark bush. Even the shapes of the umbrella ferns showed, and those strange silvery withered trees that are like skeletons... Now they could see the landing-stage and some little houses, pale too, clustered together, like shells on the lid of a box. The other passengers tramped up and down, but more slowly than they had the night before, and they looked gloomy.
This interlude slows the narrative down with sensory details that evoke unease and gloom: from the icy air, to the skeleton-like trees, to the clustered houses, to the trudging passengers, the reader cannot help but anxiously anticipate the events and conversations that will follow. We can broaden our exploration of how the story creates this mood by tracing the words "cold," "pale," and "dark" with word counts, concordances, and dispersion plots.
I told him exactly what I was permitted to tell, and no more.
Ezra Jennings is very conscious about what he can and cannot disclose to other characters (and, consequently, to readers of the text). When and why do characters withhold information throughouth The Moonstone? And how does delayed information shape the pacing of the narrative? A comparative word count of chapters and larger sections that involve deferred information can help us to determine whether the act of withholding knowledge extends or curtails narration.