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 and even after the nap she went around in a bemused state of
mental dizziness.
Life settled down once more in the House on Martin's Hill. James worked
with the machine himself and laid out lessons to guide Martha. Then,
finished for the day with education, James took to his typewriter while
Martha had her nap. It filled the days of the boy and girl completely.
This made an unexpected and pleasant change in Mrs. Bagley's routine. It
had been a job to keep Martha occupied. Now that Martha was busy, Mrs.
Bagley found time on her own hands; without interruption, her housework
routine was completed quite early in the afternoon.
Mrs. Bagley had never made any great point of getting dressed for dinner.
She accumulated a collection of house-frocks; printed cotton washables
differing somewhat in color and cut but functionally identical. She wore
them serially as they came from the row of hangers in her closet.
Now she began to acquire some dressier things, wearing them even during
her shopping trips.
James paid little attention to this change in his housekeeper's routine,
but he approved. Mrs. Bagley was also taking more pains with the 'do' of
her hair, but the boy's notice was not detailed enough to take a
part-by-section inventory of the whole. In fact, James gave the whole
matter very little thought until Mrs. Bagley made a second change after
her return from town, appearing for dinner in what James could only
classify as a party dress.