"But I'm not engaged to a multimillionaire."
"It seems queer, when I think of it," Lilas mused. "Jarvis is one of the richest men in New York, and he made his money out of the steel business—the business into which I was born. Have you ever been through a mill?"
"No."
"It's wonderful, terrible. I can smell the hot slag, the scorching cinders, the smoke, to this day. Some nights I wake up—screaming, it's so vivid. I see the glare of the furnaces, the belching flames, the showers of sparks from the converters, the streams of white-hot metal, and they seem to pour over me. I have the same dream always; I've had it ever since the night after my father was killed."
"You told me he was killed in a steel-mill."
"Yes, before my eyes. I saw it." Lilas shuddered. "I was a little girl then, but I've never forgotten. We were poor, dreadfully poor, like all the Jews—Oh yes; didn't you know I'm a Jew?"
"Then 'Lilas Lynn'—?"
"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.