If there is a fire, take this one. A liar, but an entertaining one. Which is worse? H says he will teach me and he will not. And 2,070 entries of Alice's own in the same column, arguing with a dead woman she had never met across eleven years and 4,081 books.

Thucydides, Hobbes trans., case two, shelf two, boards gone. S.H. wrote here that nobody had read this in ninety years and that she would. She did. Her pencil is in the margin of every page as far as Book Five and stops there. I have read the rest of it, and she was right about all of it and wrong about Cleon.

Alice Verity was married to Henry Wickham, Duke of Hollingbourne, at the parish church at Hollingbourne on the 4th of October, 1834, four months after publication. That was Alice's timing, and she was immovable about it. "Not before the book," she said.

She repeated for the rest of her life that a woman who marries a duke in March and publishes a catalog in June has published a catalog because she married a duke. A woman who publishes in June and marries in October has done two separate things in the right order. The entire difference between those two women, Alice said, is four months and about a hundred years of being taken seriously.

The letter at Lincoln's Inn was never withdrawn. It was presumably there still. Nobody ever produced it, and no claim was ever made, and the aunt died in 1839 without having spoken to her nephew again.

Lady Sowerby said what she had always said in three counties for another twenty years. It made no difference at all, and Alice came to understand why by about 1840. Not because anybody believed her less, but because there were two volumes on a shelf at the London Library with dates on every page, and a woman with a printed book in her hand is a very difficult thing to gossip about accurately.

Mrs. Doggett was housekeeper at Hollingbourne until 1849 and never once in fifteen years accepted so much as a shilling more than her wage. She and Alice never referred to the 9th of September again, with one exception. In January of 1841, on the anniversary of Lady Sarah's death, Mrs. Doggett came into the library with the tea and said, apropos of nothing, "She would have liked the fourth column."

"I know," said Alice. "She would have been extremely rude about your Cleon." "I know that too," said Alice Verity, "and I have been waiting nine years for somebody in this house to say so."

Mrs. Cardew wrote the preface. It was a page and a half long and did not mention the dinner. The last line of it was quoted a good deal afterward: The reader will observe that this book was begun by one woman and finished by another, and that they never met. It is my belief that they would have argued a great deal.

There were two children. The elder was a girl. The library at Hollingbourne was left to the county in 1871 with an endowment and a condition that it be open to any person on application, and it remained open.

The two quarto books, Lady Sarah's and Alice's, which were in truth the same book continued by two hands, were kept in a case in the middle of the library. There were 4,081 entries. Two hands. The change came at entry 2,012, on a page dated the 1st of October, 1829, where the ink altered and the writing grew larger.

At the top of that page, in the second hand, was a line that was not a catalog entry at all, and that Payne and Foss had queried and Alice refused to remove. Begun again this day. I do not know her. I have read her handwriting every day for a month, and I am going to try to be worth finishing it.

Once in a while, in the evenings, her husband would look up from whatever he was reading and ask the thing he never quite stopped asking. "If Doggett had not gone up to that attic, if you had come through that door in the gray stuff with the mended cuff-"

Alice, Duchess of Hollingbourne, would put down her pen. "Then Sowerby would have asked me four questions, and I would have answered them," she would say, "and everybody would have been perfectly charmed, and I should have gone back down to the kitchen at eleven and been a housemaid for another twenty years."

"It was never the questions, Henry. I could always do the questions." He would ask, "Then what was it?" Alice would look at him across the library.

"It was that you could not speak. You sat at your own table and could not get a word out in front of nine people, and every one of them thought it was horror. I stood in that doorway and knew it was not, and I have never in my life been so certain of anything, and I have been thirty-three years finding out whether I was right."

"And were you?" he would ask. "You have asked me that for thirty-three years," said Alice Verity, "and I am not going to tell you, because the day I do, you will stop asking."