d certain that her
own definition of them agrees wholly and completely with ours. After a
couple of hours of this minute detail, we'll be skipping over everything
but new words. After all, she only has to work them over once, and as we
find them, we'll mark them out of the book. Ready, Martha?"

"Can't read it."

James took the little dictionary. "Um," he said. "Hadn't occurred to me."

"What?" asked Mrs. Bagley.

"This thing says, Three-rd pers period sing periodic indic period of Be,'
the last in heavy bold type. Can't have Martha talking in abbreviations,"
he chuckled. He went to the typewriter and wrote it out fully. "Now read
that," he directed.

She did and again the process went through without a hitch. Slowly, but
surely, they progressed for almost two hours before Martha rebelled.
James stopped, satisfied with the beginning.

But as time wore on into the late autumn, Martha slowly--oh, so
slowly!--began to realize that there was importance to getting things
right. She continued to tease. But she did her teasing before James
closed the "Run" button.

CHAPTER TEN

Once James progressed Martha through the little dictionary, he began with
a book of grammar. Again it started slowly; he had to spend quite a bit
of time explaining to Martha that she did indeed know all of the terms
used in the book of grammar because they'd all been defined by the
dictionary, now she was going to learn how the terms and their
definitions were used.

James was on more familiar ground now. James, like Martha, had learned
his first halting sentence structure by mimicking his parents, but he
remembered the process of learning why and how sentences are constructed
according to the rules, and how the rules are used rather than intuition
in forming sentences.

Grammar was a topic that could not be taken in snippets and bits. Whole
paragraphs had to be read until Martha could read them without a halt or
a mispronunciation, and then committed to memory with the "Run" button
held down. At the best it was a boring process, even though it took only
minutes instead of days. It was not conflicting, but it was confusing.
It installed permanently certain solid blocks of information that were
isolated; they stood alone until later blocks came in to connect them
into a whole area.

Each session was numbing. Martha could take no more than a couple of
hours, after which her reading became foggy. She wanted a nap after each
session