“I don’t know what is with me the matter,” I began. “I have no rest in me. I never yet done what I want.”
“What is it you want to do, child?” she asked me.
“I want to do something with my head, my feelings. All day long, only with my hands I work.”
“First you must learn English.” She patted me as though I was not yet grown up. “Put your mind on that, and then we’ll see.”
So for a time I learned the language. I could almost begin to think with English words in my head. But in my heart still hurt the emptiness. I burned to give, to give something, to do something, to be something. The dead work with my hands was killing me. My work left only hard stones on my heart.
Again I went to our factory teacher and cried out to her: “I know already to read and write the English language, but I can’t put it into words what I want. What is it in me so different that can’t come out?”
She smiled at me down from her calmness as if I were a little bit out of my head. “What do you want to do?”
“I feel. I see. I hear. And I want to think it out. But I’m like dumb in me. I only feel I’m different—different from everybody.”
She looked at me close and said nothing for a minute. “You ought to join one of the social clubs of the Women’s Association,” she advised.
“What’s the Women’s Association?” I implored greedily.