It was more airy,
and fewer girls were in the room, for the dressing-frame itself
was a large, clumsy affair, that occupied a great deal of space.
Mine seemed to me as unmanageable as an overgrown spoilt child.
It had to be watched in a dozen directions every minute, and
even then it was always getting itself and me into trouble. I
felt as if the half-live creature, with its great, groaning
joints and whizzing fan, was aware of my incapacity to manage it,
and had a fiendish spite against me. I contracted an unconquer-
able dislike to it; indeed, I had never liked, and never could
learn to like, any kind of machinery. And this machine finally
conquered me. It was humiliating, but I had to acknowledge that
there were some things I could not do, and I retired from the
field, vanquished.
The two things I had enjoyed in this room were that my sister was
with me, and that our windows looked toward the west. When the
work was running smoothly, we looked out together and quoted to
each other all the sunset-poetry we could remember.
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