"Stage name. It's really Lily Levinski. We were Polish. I was dragged up, along with the other workmen's children, in the soot and grime of the Pennsylvania mills. We never saw anything green; nothing grew in our town. I learned to play on a slag-pile, and my shoes, when I had any, were full of holes--the scars are on my feet yet. Everything was grim and gray there, and the children were puny, big-eyed little things. ... The mills were hideous by day, but at night they became--oh, tremendous. They changed the sky into a flaring canopy, they roared with the clashing of rolls and the rumble of gears; the men looked black and tiny, like insects, against the red glow from the streaming metal. ... "Hell must be like those mills--it couldn't be worse. I used to watch the long rows of little cars, each with an upright ingot of hot steel on its way to the soaking-pit, and I used to fancy they were unhappy spirits going from one torture to another. When the furnaces opened and the flames belched out into the night--they threw horrible black shadows, you know, like eddies of pitch--or when the converters dumped. ... They lit up the sky with an explosion of reds and yellows and whites that put out the stars. It--it was like nothing so much as hell." Lorelei had never heard her room-mate speak with such feeling nor in such a strain. But Lilas seemed quite unconscious of her little burst of eloquence. She was seated, leaning forward now with hands locked between her knees; her eyes were brilliant in the gathering dusk. Her memories seemed to affect her with a kind of horror, yet to hold her fascinated and to demand expression. "I was an imaginative kid," she continued. "It's a trait of our people, like--well, like their distrust of authority and their fear of law. You see, persecution made them cunning, but underneath they are fierce and revengeful and--lawless. I inherited all these traits--but that has nothing to do with the story. Father worked in the Bessemer plant, like any hunkie, and the women used to bring the men's lunches to them. Mother wasn't strong, and that duty fell to me; I had my stand where I used to wait for the whistle to blow. ... "It was one of the biggest mills in Pennsylvania, and its tonnage was always heavy because the superintendent was a slave-driver. He was one of those men who are born without soul or feeling, and he had no interest in anything except rails and plates. His plant held the record, month after month, but at last he lost the broom at the stack. That was the pennant of victory--a broom tied to the highest chimney. I remember hearing father and the others talk about it, and they seemed to feel the loss--although, goodness knows, they had little reason for wanting to keep the broom, since it meant only more sweat and labor for them, while the glory all went to the superintendent. But that's the way with men. ...