p trying save those
girl'. I think they like ruin best. I turn my back--they ruin."

Iromea was the sturdy veteran of the corps. Tall, handsome, straight,
mother of four children, obliging, wise in the way of the white,
herself all native.

"And the babies?" I inquired.

"They all scatter. Some in country; some different place," answered
Iromea, who ran from English to French to Tahitian, but of course
not with the ease of Lovaina, for that great heart knew many of the
cities of her father's land, was educated in needlework style, and
with a little dab of Yankee culture, now fast disappearing as she
grew older. One marked that tendency to reversion to the native type
and ways among many islanders who had been superficially coated with
civilization, but whom environment and heredity claim inexorably.

Iromea was thirty years old. She had been loved by many white men,
men of distinction here; sea-rovers, merchants, and lotus-eaters,
writers, painters, and wastrels.

Juillet, whose native name was Tiurai, helped old Madame Rose to care
for the rooms at the Tiare. She was thirteen years old, willowy,
with a beautiful, smiling face, and two long, black plaits. Though
innocent, almost artless, in appearance, she was an arch coquette,
and flirted with old and young. One day a turkey that shared the back
yard with two automobiles, a horse, three carriages, several dogs,
ten cats, and forty chickens, disappeared. Juillet was sent to find
the turkey. She was gone four days, and came back with a brilliant
new gown. She brought with her the turkey, which she said she had
been trying to drive back all the four days.

Juillet was named for the month of July. Her mother was the cook
of a governor when she was born on the fourteenth of July, the
anniversary of the fall of the Bastile, and the governor named her
for the month. She was also named Nohorae, and noho means to be naked
and rae forehead. Juillet had a high forehead.

Lovaina pointed out to me the man who had taken away her favorite
helper. He was about forty years old, tall, angular, sharp-nosed, with
gold eyeglasses. I would have expected to meet him in the vestry of
a church or to have been asked by him at a mission if I were saved,
but in Tahiti he had gone the way of all flesh. His voice had the
timbre of the preacher. He had come to the hotel in an expensive,
new automobile to fetch cooked food for himself and Ruine.

"Seven or eight leper that man support," sa