My return to mill-work involved making acquaintance with a new kind of
machinery. The spinning-room was the only one I had hitherto known
anything about. Now my sister Emilie found a place for me in the
dressing-room, beside herself. 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 unconquerable
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. Our tastes did not quite agree.
Her favorite description of the clouds was from Pollok:--
"They seemed like chariots of saints,
By fiery coursers drawn; as brightly hued
As if the glorious, bushy, golden locks
Of thousand cherubim had been shorn off,
And on the temples hung of morn and even."