Still Miss Quincey was nothing if not heroic; night after
night twelve o'clock would find her painfully trying to draw water from
the wells of literature. She had begun upon Browning; set herself to read
through the whole of _Sordello_ from beginning to end. It is as easy as a
sum in arithmetic if you don't bother your head too much about the
Guelphs and Ghibellines and the metaphors and things, and if you take it
in short fits, say three pages every evening. Never any more, or you
might go to sleep and forget all about it; never any less, or you would
have bad arrears. As there are exactly two hundred and thirteen pages,
she calculated that she would finish it in ten weeks and a day. There was
no place for Miss Quincey and her pile of marble-backed exercise-books in
the dim and dingy first-floor drawing-room (Mrs. Moon and the
bandy-legged cabinet would have had something to say to that). All this
terrific intellectual travail went on in a dimmer and dingier dining-room
beneath it.
Then one night, old Martha, disturbed by sounds that came from Miss
Juliana's bedroom, groped her way fumblingly in and found Miss Juliana
sitting up in her sleep and posing the darkness with a problem.
"If," said Miss Juliana, "three men can finish one hundred and nineteen
hogsheads of Browning in eight weeks, how long will it take seven women
to finish a thousand and forty-five--forty-five--forty-five, if one woman
works twice as hard as eleven men?"
Martha shook her head and went fumbling back to bed again; and being a
conscientious servant she said nothing about it for fear of frightening
the old lady.
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