Ella felt her second emotion. How does a house, lacking flesh, feel fury? With the fire in its hearth and in the wide black stove. Ella felt anger with her kitchen fires and felt anger with the fifteen stairs, especially the seventh, and she felt anger with the yellow wallpaper that had been half stripped from the walls of her old bedroom and dangled there for weeks while Patrice was in an argument with the decorators. Ella’s stepmother was in no hurry to turn the emptied chamber into a new study. The house had rooms enough. Ella’s bedroom festered like the socket of a pulled tooth. She had
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