It is as easy as a sum in arithmetic if you don't bother your head too much about the Guelphs and Ghibellines and the metaphors and things, and if you take it in short fits, say three pages every evening.

Never any more, or you might go to sleep and forget all about it; never any less, or you would have bad arrears.

As there are exactly two hundred and thirteen pages, she calculated that she would finish it in ten weeks and a day.

There was no place for Miss Quincey and her pile of marble-backed exercise-books in the dim and dingy first-floor drawing-room (Mrs.Moon and the bandy-legged cabinet would have had something to say to that).

All this terrific intellectual travail went on in a dimmer and dingier dining-room beneath it.
Then one night, old Martha, disturbed by sounds that came from Miss Juliana's bedroom, groped her way fumblingly in and found Miss Juliana sitting up in her sleep and posing the darkness with a problem.
"If," said Miss Juliana, "three men can finish one hundred and nineteen hogsheads of Browning in eight weeks, how long will it take seven women to finish a thousand and forty-five--forty-five--forty-five, if one woman works twice as hard as eleven men ?" Martha shook her head and went fumbling back to bed again; and being a conscientious servant she said nothing about it for fear of frightening the old lady.
About a fortnight later, Rhoda Vivian, sailing down the corridor, came upon the little arithmetic teacher all sick and tremulous, leaning up against the hot-water pipes beside a pile of exercise-books.