She belonged in the rear of a batch of a dozen, and had never been properly named. The wind was blowing from the stockyards on the dark hour when she arrived. It penetrated even to the small airless chamber where she struggled for her first breath--one of a "flat" in the poorest tenement in the worst slum in Chicago. Huddled in smelly rags by a hastily summoned neighbour from the floor above, the newcomer raised her untried voice in a frail, reedy cry. Perhaps she did not like the smell that oozed in around the tightly closed window to combat the foul odours of the airless room. Whatever it was, this protest availed her nothing, for the neighbour hurriedly departed, having been unwilling from the first, and the mother turned away and lay close against the stained, discoloured wall, too apathetic, too utterly resigned to the fate life had meted out to her to accord this most unwelcome baby further attention. This first moment of her life might easily serve as the history of her babyhood. Her father was also indifferent. He brought home his money and gave it to his wife--children were strictly none of his business. Her brothers and sisters, each one busily and fiercely fending for himself, gave no attention to her small affairs. Tossed by the careless hand of Fate into the dark sea of life to swim or perish, she awoke to consciousness with but one thought--food; one ruling passion--to get enough. And since, in her habitual half-starved state, all food looked superlatively good to her, cake was the first word she learned to speak. It formed her whole vocabulary for a surprisingly long time, and Cake was the only name she was ever known by in her family circle and on the street that to her ran on and on and on as narrow and dirty, as crowded and as cruel as where it passed the great dilapidated old rookery that held the four dark rooms that she called home. Up to the age of ten her life was sketchy. A passionate scramble for food, beatings, tears, slumber, a swift transition from one childish ailment to another that kept her forever out of reach of the truant officer. She lay upon the floor in a little dark room, and through the window in the airless air-shaft, high up in one corner, she could see a three-cornered spot of light. At first she wondered what it was, since she lived in a tenement, not under the sky. Then it resolved itself into a ball, white and luminous, that floated remote in that high place and seemed to draw her, and was somehow akin to the queer, gnawing pain that developed about that time beneath her breastbone. It was all inarticulate, queer and confused. She did not think, she did not know how. She only felt that queer gnawing beneath her breastbone, distinct from all her other pains, and which she ascribed to hunger, and saw the lovely, trembling globe of light. At first she felt it only when she was ill and lay on the tumbled floor bed and looked up through the dark window; afterward always in her dreams.