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Updated: July 14, 2025
At night when you lay on your back in the dark you thought about being born and about arithmetic and God. The sacred number three went into eighteen sixty-nine and didn't come out again; so did seven. She liked numbers that fitted like that with no loose ends left over. Mr. Sippett said there were things you could do with the loose ends of numbers to make them fit. That was fractions.
Every Wednesday at half-past eleven the boys' tutor, Mr. Sippett, looked in and taught Rodney "Mensa: a table." Mamma told them they must never be naughty with Miss Thompson because her mother was dead. They went away and talked about her among the gooseberry bushes at the bottom of the garden. "I don't know how we're going to manage," Rodney said.
When Mark went to Chelmsted that autumn he left her his brown Greek Accidence and Smith's Classical Dictionary, besides Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. She taught herself Greek in the hour after breakfast before Miss Sippett came to give her her music lesson. She was always careful to leave the Accidence open where Miss Sippett could see it and realise that she was not a stupid little girl.
But whether Miss Sippett saw the Accidence or not she always behaved as if it wasn't there. When Mamma saw the Accidence open on the drawing-room table she shut it and told you to put it in its proper place. If you talked about it her mouth buttoned up tight, and her eyes blinked, and she began tapping with her foot. There was something queer about learning Greek.
Supposing there was somewhere in the world a number that simply wouldn't fit? Mr. Sippett said there was no such number. But queer things happened. You were seven years old, yet you had had eight birthdays. There was the day you were born, January the twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-three, at five o'clock in the morning.
You might not know them to-day; but you would know them to-morrow or the next day. By midsummer Mary could read the books that Dank read. If it had not been for Mr. Sippett and "Mensa: a table," she would have known as much as Roddy. Almost before they had time to be naughty Miss Thompson had gone. Mamma said that Roddy was not getting on fast enough.
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