Wire-Glass Characters.
Wire glass may be seen in many of the new buildings, used in office windows, and especially in elevator shafts. In the panes of glass, as they are made, are embedded wire screens with very coarse mesh. These circles of wire are about an inch across. One can get accustomed to them so that they obstruct the view very slightly. Indeed, one hardly realizes that they are there.
And what is the advantage? The extraordinary toughness the wire imparts to the glass. Above all, the safety against fire. Insurance companies recognize the latter quality by cheerful reductions of the premiums upon buildings thus equipped.
When a swirl of fire strikes against ordinary glass, it cracks and falls out. Then the flames sweep through, and the entire building is soon gutted. But wire glass will hold back flame to the point of 1700° Fahrenheit, or even more. It will hold back flame until the wire itself is melted, and even then a stream of water striking against it will solidify it instantly. The glass will crack, but it will not fall out. Thus it is that outside windows of wire glass may dispense with iron shutters. They are even better than iron shutters, for they are more certain to be closed at night.
Now that is the sort of character I should like to possess. Clear and transparent, letting the sunshine through, letting through the ideas and events of the great world outside, hospitable and sweet. Firm and tough, tenacious of my own notions, holding to my own designs, protective of my own possessions against the fiercest fire-storm of opposing elements. I want to combine these two seemingly unfriendly qualities. The wire glass shows me how they may be combined.
There is the open window, admitting everything, zephyrs and hurricanes, butterflies and bats, fragrance and fire-blasts. That is perilous. There is the iron-shuttered window, safe and secluding, but dark, damp, dingy, and horribly gloomy.
Some lives have one of these and some the other. I will have both. I will live in the world, but not of the world. I will be all things to all men, but I will work out my own salvation. I will seek sweetness and light. I will also seek firmness and strength. It is a new idea in a building. I suspect that I shall find it to have been a very old idea in the making of a soul.