"There will be some that whirl more madly still," she thought, and expected to hear, when the next door was opened, a deafening thunder. But nothing of the sort happened. This was the one machine in the whole factory to provide her with entertainment. In the workroom where the chiselling was done, dozens of men stood at long tables, levelling the uneven surface of the cast metal, and making the separate parts of an ornament ready for joining. This was done in the room adjacent, where the flames of the blowpipes leapt and hissed, and clouds of metallic vapour shot up sparks. Each workman had a little pile of burnished arms and legs beside him that looked as if they had been amputated and had left the body they belonged to behind. Then they came to the "filigree" department, where all the flowers and foliage were elaborated--the ribbons, tendrils, and arabesques, everything of a light, curly, and daintily twining character. So delicate was the work that it made the men engaged on it look all the clumsier and coarser. They scarcely raised their eyes, and hammered on in a dogged mechanical way. Lilly, wherever she went, had a keener eye for the appearance and manner of the workpeople than for the work itself. She drew comparisons inwardly, decided who was well-to-do and who the reverse, who pursued his avocation because he liked it, and who only because he was goaded to it by necessity and sickness at home. Each department had its own marked physiognomy. In one the majority would be fresh and active; in another, weary and exhausted. Lilly felt as she had done when Herr Dehnicke first told her about his workpeople: an insane desire to have the wielding of their fate in her hands, to help them when help was needed, to bring sunshine into their gloomy lives, and to be a good angel to the suffering. But she was careful not to confide her absurd notions to Herr Dehnicke. "Now we come to the most critical part of the business," he said, "the patina application, which gives the figures their style." He opened the door of a workshop which exhaled the odour of a thousand more poisons. Here women were at work with the men, putting on varnish and acids, rubbing and brushing busily. They looked haggard and tired out. At the sight of Lilly they dropped their implements to stare at her in blank amazement.