uline nor feminine, but human. As Vance Thompson has said,
the lioness is a lion all but a little of the time, and so Mamise put
off sexlessness with her overalls and put it on with her petticoats.
She put off the coarseness at the same time as she scrubbed away the
grime.

The shipyard was still a realm of faery to her. It was an unending
experience of miracles, commonplace to the men, but wonder-work to
her. She had not known what "pneumatic" or "hydraulic" really meant.
The acetylene flame-knife, the incomprehensible ability of levers to
give out so much more power than was put in them, dazed her. Nothing
in the Grimms' stories could parallel the benevolent ogres of air and
water and their dumfounding transformations.

She learned that machinery can be as beautiful as any other human
structure. Fools and art-snobs had said that machinery is ugly, and
some of it is indeed nearly as ugly as some canvases, verses, and
cathedrals. Other small-pates chattered of how the divine works of
nature shamed the crudities of man. They spoke of the messages of the
mountains, the sublimities of sunsets, and the lessons taught by the
flowerets. These things are impressive, but it ought to be possible to
give them praise without slandering man's creations, for a God that
could make a man that could make a work of art would have to be a
better God than one who could merely make a work of art himself.

But machinery has its messages, too. It enables the little cave-dweller
to pulverize the mountain; to ship it to Mohammed in Medina; to pick it
up and shoot it at his enemies.

Mamise, at any rate, was so enraptured by the fine art of machinery
that when she saw a traveling-crane pick up a mass of steel and go
down the track with it to its place, she thought that no poplar-tree
was ever so graceful. And the rusty hulls of the new ships showing the
sky through the steel lace of their rivetless sides were fairer than
the sky.

Surgeons in steel operated on the battered epidermis of the _Mamise_
and sewed her up again. It was slow work and it had all the
discouraging influence of work done twice for one result. But the toil
went on, and when at last Davidge left the hospital he was startled by
the change in the vessel. As a father who has left a little girl at
home comes back to find her a grown woman, so he saw an almost
finished ship where he had left a patchwork of iron plates.

It thrilled him to be back at work again. The silence