She didn’t enjoy her peers any more at thirty than she had at ten: “Sitting & listening to people you went to school with is excruciating for an hour—to hear the same conversation day in & day out is better than the Chinese torture method.” Even worse, she confessed, “I simply can’t work here.” “Genius overcomes all obstacles, etc., and this is no excuse,” she said with characteristic self-deprecation that summer, but she also wanted, with increasing desperation, to be back at her makeshift desk in her make-do apartment, making things.
