It was a curious scene: a lot of little tents with a wall around them, the same symbolic figure of the woman with the torch stood upon the wall, pointing a stiff arm at a man outside, a warrior, who had a knife in hand.
Underneath were printed in flaming characters two Indian words: “Notick! Notick!” signifying: “Hear! Hear!”
“I always did feel fascinated by that Wise Woman who saved–a–city.” Pem looked adoringly at her handiwork. “A besieged Jewish city, away back in King David’s time! To be sure, one reads of it in–in what’s a bloodthirsty chapter of the Old Testament! And she saved the town by ordering the death of a rebel, a traitor, proclaiming that she, herself, was loyal and faithful to the king–so were her people–making Joab, David’s captain, that man with the knife, outside the wall, listen when she cried to him: ‘Hear! Hear!’ She had more sense than the men about her–and one isn’t told the least thing further about her, not even her name. That’s what makes her mysterious–and fascinating.... Yet she saved a city!”
The girl drew a long breath–a suddenly fired breath.
Was it up to her now to save a city: the citadel of her father’s courage–of that rose-colored conviction which is half the battle on earth or in the air? How was she to do it?
Her eye went wandering around the room. Trained to the eloquence of symbols, it lit on something. Just a sheen of pearls and a little loom upon a table–myriads of pearly beads, woven and unwoven, with here and there a ray of New Jerusalem colors, ruby, emerald, blazing through them–the New Jerusalem of hope.
“Ah-h!”
Breathlessly she caught it up, that something, four feet and a half of the beaded history of a girl,–pearl-woven prophecy, too!
Hugging it to her breast, that long leather strip, an inch and a half in width, on which her glowing young life-story was woven in pearls, with those rainbow flashes of color–the loom with it–she hurried out of the room.
Never, perhaps, did a professor’s laboratory, the stern, hardware “lab.” of a mechanical engineer, react to anything so fairy-like as when Pem, scurrying down a flight of stairs to the workshop which her father had fitted up in his own house–not his University laboratory with the tall spectroscope–sat down to a table and began industriously to weave.