Rigorously well balanced, stately paragraphs shred into spindly fragments. The mother is trying to explain something but is constantly being interrupted. The boy recombines Greek numerical prefixes to create new adjectives. The son’s incessant questions—Who was X? Who was Y? Why don’t you Z?— create a tempo of agitation and interruption not only for the mother but also for the reader. Greek-derived numerical prefixes bludgeon the listener. The mind of this new version of Ludo’s mother can barely sustain a thought, let alone explain everything. In the contrast between these two versions of the same passage, we see the difference between writing “as if for an intelligent six-year-old” and writing while doing the unpaid reproductive labor of taking care of an intelligent sixyear-old, the difference between writing without interruption and writing while having to do other work.