"Martha?"
Martha took a deep breath and said, nicely, "'A' is the first
letter of the English Alphabet."
"Good." He pressed the button. "Again? Please?"
Martha recited it nicely.
"Fine," he said. "Now we'll look up 'Is' and go on from there."
"My goodness," said Mrs. Bagley, "this is going to take months."
"Not at all," said James. "It just goes slowly at the start. Most of the
definitions use the same words over and over again. Martha really knows
most of these simple words, we've just got to be dead 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."