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