It was several weeks before Professor Carter, Alice and George had any clear idea of who the strange, weirdly beautiful young girl might be, or where she had come from. Her name, which almost at once she was able to indicate to them, sounded as though it might be Lea—a limpid syllable as near that as they could determine. Professor Carter had told no one in the quiet little New England village about her. For the first few days, vaguely it had seemed that from some distant place a hue and cry would be raised for her; news that such a girl had escaped from some asylum, circus or Heaven knows what.
But nothing developed. No such girl seemed missing. It confirmed George and his father's own conviction; incredibly this timid, new little inmate of the prosaic Carter household was of a race so far unknown.
"Why, look at her, George," Professor Carter had exclaimed that first evening. "That complexion, creamy, ivory-tinted—perfect for an earth-girl. But don't you see that glow of opalescence in it? God, that's weird, unnatural, unexplainable. And look at the shape of her skull—not our shape. Not Neanderthal. I'd call it perhaps more in the line of Cro-Magnon. Yet hardly that either. My guess is that the skeleton formation, particularly the skull, certainly in many ways represents a development different from ours."
Professor Carter was scientifically enthusiastic, amazed and thrilled by this mysterious specimen of living young female so miraculously here for him to study. George's father was a stocky, thick-set man of nearly sixty, square-rigged like a brig. His face was solid, heavily lined from almost a constant habit of grimness. He had a sunburned baldspot with a fringe of iron-gray hair. There was nothing of the dreamer, the romanticist in the practical scientific nature of Professor Carter—save that to him, everything scientific was the essence of romance. His deep-set gray eyes were sparkling with earnestness as he regarded the queerly beautiful little Lea.
"A primitive race, George. And yet, look at her expression. Those delicately chiseled features. She has artistic feeling—a mentality different from ours, but perhaps in some ways even more advanced."
To young Carter, the classification was repugnant, as though this frightened, wild little creature were a bug under a microscope. And Alice evidently felt the same.
"Father, stop it!" she exclaimed. "Don't boom at her like that. She's still too frightened."
George's blind sister was slender, brown-haired. Her face had a gentle, wistful beauty, enhanced into pathos by the blankness of her pale-brown eyes. Here in her own home where she had lived all her sightless life, she could move with almost normal freedom. It was she who took care of Lea at first. But as the days passed into weeks the strange little visitor, alert of mentality, always with a whimsical smile, began taking care of the blind girl. Lea's language of soft, weird syllables defied Professor Carter's classification. He and George could do nothing with it. But from the first, with extraordinary concentration and abnormal aptitude, at once Lea began learning English. That her mentality was different, and in this respect certainly far superior to their own, immediately became apparent. With amazing rapidity she memorized and understood the words and phrases with which patiently they drilled her. With Alice as her constant companion, she made an immediate effort to fit into what was for her, the strangeness of their household. Often she would laugh with what obviously was a keen sense of whimsical humor—a little rippling rill of girlish laughter....
The knowledge of who she was and where she had come from, of necessity was imparted gradually to the still incredulous Carters. Obviously now she was struggling with their language with the desire to tell them. There was still another mystery about her which that very first evening, Alice had discovered. Beneath one of her armpits, held by a strap around her body, there was a small vial, seemingly of some tough vegetable fiber. She had wildly, vehemently resisted everyone's effort to touch it; she would never let it leave her person.
Then at last came her ability to make them really understand that she had come from a strange world of infinite smallness. A world so tiny that it was vastly beyond the reach of any microscope. A world in an atom.