The small cabinet in the Derren household had four drawers, each labelled with a day. The largest was marked Sundays. A later owner assumed it contained letters received on that day, but the arrangement makes better sense when understood as a record of work waiting to be done rather than post already delivered.
Shopkeeper Lydia Derren answered personal correspondence on Sunday afternoons. Business notes were dealt with during the week and kept elsewhere. The drawer therefore gathered invitations, family questions and the kind of news that deserved an answer longer than a message entrusted to somebody passing through the next village.
Derren folded each incoming letter around a small slip carrying the main points of her reply. Some slips contain complete sentences. Others give only a name, a sum or a reminder to ask after a particular person. They were prompts for writing, not copies intended to preserve her side of every exchange.
The drawer's order consequently records interruptions. A letter postponed for want of an address might remain behind a newer one already answered. An apparently neglected invitation could be accompanied by a slip showing that a reply had been sent. Reading the contents as a strict sequence would give a misleading impression of both Derren's habits and her relationships.
The cabinet survived after the other labels became illegible. Sundays remained the easiest word to read, partly because that drawer had been opened most often. Its contents show a household making time for correspondence by giving it a place. The label named an available portion of the week, and the letters gathered around it.