The slipshod informality of the meal, the constant faultfinding of the hostess, made it something of a trial.  Lorelei was not sorry when it was over and Lilas took her to look at the vacant flat.

Miss Moore’s apartment offered a wide contrast to the one they had just quitted, being very small and very modestly furnished; but it was on the second floor, convenient to both elevator and stairway, it boasted a piano, and the superintendent allowed his prospective tenant to name her own terms.  She descended with relief, feeling that she had made not a bad bargain.

She stated, as she sank into Lilas’s big library chair, “I feel quite independent at last.  The rent is ridiculous, and I can do my own cooking.”

“Don’t make a fool of yourself.  You can do as well as I’ve done.  You have the looks.”

“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.”