“But what’s the point?” she said, picking a slip out of the trunk and looking at it. “Half the people who say these words will never be able to read them.”

“Maybe not,” I said, heaving the trunk onto her bed. “But their words are important.”

We looked at the mess of slips inside the trunk. I remembered all the times I’d searched the volumes and the pigeon-holes for just the right word to explain what I was feeling, experiencing. So often, the words chosen by the men of the Dictionary had been inadequate.

“Dr. Murray’s dictionary leaves things out, Lizzie. Sometimes a word, sometimes a meaning. If it isn’t written down, it doesn’t even get considered.” I placed Mabel’s first slips in a pile on the bed. “Wouldn’t it be good if the words these women use were treated the same as any other?”

I started sifting through slips and papers in the trunk, pulling out women’s words and putting them to one side. Some words began to pile up, with different quotations from different women. I had no idea I’d collected so many.

Lizzie reached under her bed and pulled out her sewing basket. “You’ll be needing these if you’re going to keep all that in order.” She put her pincushion in front of me; it was hedgehog-full.

When I’d finished sorting all the words in the trunk it was dark outside. Both of us had sore fingers from pinning slips together.

“Keep it,” Lizzie said, when I handed back the pincushion. “For new words.”

There was a tiny hole in the wall of the Scriptorium, just above my desk. I’d noticed it when the chill of the previous winter had pricked the back of my hand like a needle. I’d tried to block it with a ball of paper, but the paper kept falling out. Then I realised I had a view: I caught fragments of people as they smoked their cigarettes; of Da and Mr. Balk as they packed their pipes and exchanged Dictionary gossip. Gossipiania, I always thought, when titbits found my ear. An entry had been written for the word, but it was struck through in the final proof. I recognised all the assistants from what I could see of their clothes, and I had the uncanny feeling I was under the sorting table again.