In her cool, airy workroom with the green trees of the big Square outside, this little woman heats and bends and bores her metals and shines her stones in their quaint settings, with a rapt absorption that is balanced by her steady skill.

It is no light or easy work, this making of hand-made jewelry, and it requires no inconsiderable gift of delicate fancy and artistic judgment.

This girl is an artist, not the less so because she makes her flowers and dragons and symbolic figures out of metal instead of canvas and paint; not the less so because her colours do not come in tubes but imprisoned in the rare, exotic tints of shimmering gems.
Here is a ring of slightly dulled silver--the design is of a water lily, fragile and delicate.

In the heart of it lies, like a dewdrop, a pale-green jewel called peridot.

Here is the soft, rich blue of _lapis lazuli_--here the keener azure of turquoise matrix.