They had to gesticulate, nod, talk in a loud voice, but they got on best with their faces close up to one another in all this whizzing, where the band-wheels each whirred away for their little sub-division of power, the boards of the floor quivered and shook with the movement of the engines, and the waterfall outside in the sun, with a thundering and deafening roar, buried the great water-wheel beneath its creamy, powerful splendour.
They were for the most part quite young vagabond girls of from barely sixteen to twenty, who were making the noise up there: new-comers, more or less, without practice, who were still striving to acquire the knack.
And that was Silla Holman, she with the dark hair, slender and freckled, with heelless slippers and a large spot of paraffine on the front of her dress, who coughed and questioned, and questioned and coughed, while her eyes looked like two little round, black fire-balls, and her weak, flat chest went up and down with the mere exertion of making herself heard.
She sat there among the youngest; her fingers worked among the spools, and now and then she looked up like a bird.
They had got over the angry dispute about Josefa's new braided jacket.
She need not try to persuade any one that she had got the money from her stepmother; no, let any one who liked believe that, but neither Gunda nor Jakobina did! Then Kristofa had related her wonderful adventure of last Sunday--she was always passing through remarkable occurrences, most wonderfully interesting, if not true to quite a corresponding degree, in which fine ladies and gentlemen played the principal parts, and she chanced to be the initiated one.
And now the conversation had turned upon something so interesting that Silla listened with both her ears.

There was to be dancing on Sunday evening up at the Letvindt, and the talk was of handkerchiefs, bows, and finery--which some possessed and others had to borrow--and of who danced best and treated most liberally.

Kristofa was able to inform them that there was to be a violin and a clarionet, and that both students and ordinary people and ships' officers were to be there! Some strangers who were going over the factory came up the room, and stopped and questioned and examined.

And the young workwomen sat each in her place, with head bent over her work, as if she had no thought for anything but her reels.
The morning light shone with a kind of dizzy stillness in from the great windows high up in the wall, over human beings, machinery and bales.
It was nearly twelve.

The last hour always dragged so slowly, and the smell of oil and the heat from the engines seemed to increase and become almost stupifying.
Still a few more long stifling minutes.