The girl in her said: "Go back. They will think you are seeking love. They will think that with your white teeth, your sloe-black eyes, your color of fine bronze, your body, lithe and sleek and graceful as a cat's, you want love from the king of the Jews." And all her face flushed at that thought, and she debated whether she should send for the captain general of the fighting men and tell him to face his troops about and return to her Ethiopia. But the queen in her rose and said: "What care I what they say? Does Sheba need the love of any lowland king, or plead for alliance? Sheba is Sheba, and what Sheba does is Sheba's business." And the woman of her brooded softly: "I will go on. Somewhere there is an answer to all the questions, and if he does n't know the answer, perhaps he can help me to find them."  
"And perhaps he has questions of his own," she said, "and I can help him answer those." A sad boyhood, she had heard his was, with his father David droning psalms in his latter days, busy at his prayers as a potter at his lathe, calling for mercy for his own soul.... And his mother, the queen, who had once been wife to Uriah the Hittite, a strange, mad old woman who walked about the palace, gibbering to herself, her face and fingers twisting, all the white beauty that had dazzled David upon the roof of the king's house turned now to an awesome gray rugosity.... A house of fear, Sheba thought, a house of silence, and she understood how Solomon could have become so wise, for wisdom comes with the quiet tongue....
 
Wisdom he had, according to all reporters, but the wisdom she had heard about was wis............