easy · Enhanced ACT reading

The clock on Delia's workbench had not ticked in forty years, but she spoke to it as though it might answer. Each morning she unlatched its brass casing, breathed on the gears, and wiped them with a cloth so worn it had gone translucent. Her neighbors called the shop a museum of dead things—rows of silent clocks, their hands frozen at private hours. Delia did not mind the word. A museum, she reasoned, was where people went to remember, and remembering was honest work. She had inherited the shop from her father, who had inherited it from his. Both men had believed that a clock's value lay in its accuracy. Delia believed otherwise. A clock that ran too fast, she said, was merely lying quickly; a clock that had stopped told the truth about at least one moment in the day. When customers brought her their heirlooms, she rarely charged them. She asked instead to keep the machines overnight, and in the dark she would wind them, listening for the particular cough or stutter that made each one unlike the rest. By closing time the shelves ticked in a hundred mismatched rhythms, a chorus with no conductor, and Delia—who lived alone—found the noise to be a kind of company. The narrator's use of the phrase "lying quickly" to describe a fast clock primarily serves to convey Delia's

1. Distrust of the many clocks she repairs
2. Wry preference for honesty over mere speed
3. Belief she should serve only wealthy clients
4. Agreement with her father's faith in accuracy

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