I have this assignment for intro to prog and my instructor is *famous* for giving us assignments using things that we'd have no way of knowing about. Here's the question. (Remember, I'm not asking for the whole solution, just a "key command" or something to get me pointed in right direction.

Here's the Q: What kind of cout << do I use to get this to happen?

I need to make a shape based on user input. i.e. if the user typed in a x and a 5 the output would be like this:
x
xxx
xxxxx
xxx
x

I understand the counters, loops, if, and while statements I'll be using. Here's the problem. How do I get the prog to output varying instances of the variable "Letter". in other words, how do I get it to do 1 x then 3 x's and then 5 x's everytime I enter a new loop?

I've tried working a counter that adds 2 to itself every loop and then trying something like:
cout << Letter * counter << endl;

But I end up getting the ANSCI equivalent of the Letter times the value of counter. (So it outputs like 282 instead of XXXXX or something....)

Any help is very much appreciated!