large eyes were hazel, and they were very brilliant when she was merry
or excited. Her expansive face had no lines in it, and her mouth
was a perfection of curves, the teeth white and even. Her hair was
red-brown, curling in rich profusion, scented with the hinano-flower,
adorning her charmingly poised head in careless grace.

When she said, "I glad see you," there was a glow of amiability, an
alluring light in her countenance, that drew one irresistibly to her,
and her immense, shapely hand enveloped one's own with a pressure
and a warmth that were overpowering in their convincement of her good
heart and illimitable generosity.

Lovaina was only one fourth Tahitian, all the remainder of her racial
inheritance being American; but she was all Tahitian in her traits,
her simplicity, her devotion to her friends, her catching folly as
it flew, and her pride in a new possession.

One morning I got up at five o'clock and went to the bath beside the
kitchen. It was a shower, and the water from the far Fautaua valley
the softest, most delicious to the body, cool and balmy in the heat
of the tropic. Coming and going to baths here, whites throw off
easily the fear of being thought immodest, and women and men alike
go to and fro in loin-cloths, pajamas, or towels. I wore the pareu,
the red strip of calico, bearing designs by William Morris, which
the native buys instead of his original one of tapa, the beaten cloth
made from tree bark or pith.

I met Lovaina coming out of the shower, a sheet about her which could
not cover half of her immense and regal body. She hesitated--I was
almost a stranger,--and in a vain effort to do better, trod on the
sheet, and pulled it to her feet. I picked it up for her.

"I shamed for you see me like this!" she said.

I was blushing all over, though why I don't know, but I faltered:

"Like a great American Beauty rose."

"Faded rose too big," exclaimed Lovaina, with the faintest air of
coquetry as I hastily shut the door.

A little while later, when I came to the dining-room for the first
breakfast, I met Lovaina in a blue-figured aahu of muslin and
lace, a close-fitting, sweeping nightgown, the single garment that
Tahitians wear all day and take off at night, a tunic, or Mother
Hubbard, which reveals their figures without disguise, unstayed,
unpetticoated. Lovaina was, as always, barefooted, and she took me
into her garden, one of the few cultivated in Tahiti, where nature
makes man al