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. ...

“One day I took my bucket and joined the line of women and girls that filed in through the gates.  I was twelve then, but stunted with smoke and thin from poverty.  I’ll never forget that day; the sole of one of my shoes was worn through, and cinders kept working in.  I took my stand just outside the Bessemer plant.  It was a big shell of steel girders and corrugated iron, and the side where we were was open.  Away up above were the roaring crucibles where the metal was fluxed; beneath ran the little flat-cars waiting for the ingots to be poured.  Father saw me and waved his hand—­he always waved at me—­then I saw the superintendent coming through—­a big, square-faced man whom everybody feared.  We kids used to think he was an ogre and ate little people.  He was raging and swearing and spurring the men on to more haste—­I heard later that he had sworn to win the broom back if he wrecked the plant.  Wherever he went, the hunkies danced; he could put life into a dead man’s limbs, that man.  It was because of their great fear of him and his furious urging that—­something happened.”

Lilas had begun her recital slowly, without apparent object, but once into it she seemed unable to stop; and now, although her words came haltingly, it was plain that she had worked herself into a sort of hysteria in which she gave little heed to her hearer.  It was characteristic of her that she could so excite herself by the power of visualization as to be completely transported.