was more often than not at sixes and sevens with her.
He could never anticipate what she would say or do next. Of only one
thing was he sure, and that was that whatever she said or did was bound
to be unexpected and unsuspected. There seemed, too, something almost
hysterical in her make-up. Her temper was quick and stormy, and she
relied too much on herself and too little on him, which did not
approximate at all to his ideal of woman's conduct when a man was around.
Her assumption of equality with him was disconcerting, and at times he
half-consciously resented the impudence and bizarreness of her intrusion
upon him--rising out of the sea in a howling nor'wester, fresh from
poking her revolver under Ericson's nose, protected by her gang of huge
Polynesian sailors, and settling down in Berande like any shipwrecked
sailor. It was all on a par with her Baden-Powell and the long 38
Colt's.

At any rate, she did not look the part. And that was what he could not
forgive. Had she been short-haired, heavy-jawed, large-muscled, hard-
bitten, and utterly unlovely in every way, all would have been well.
Instead of which she was hopelessly and deliciously feminine. Her hair
worried him, it was so generously beautiful. And she was so slenderly
and prettily the woman--the girl, rather--that it cut him like a knife to
see her, with quick, comprehensive eyes and sharply imperative voice,
superintend the launching of the whale-boat through the surf. In
imagination he could see her roping a horse, and it always made him
shudder. Then, too, she was so many-sided. Her knowledge of literature
and art surprised him, while deep down was the feeling that a girl who
knew such things had no right to know how to rig tackles, heave up
anchors, and sail schooners around the South Seas. Such things in her
brain were like so many oaths on her lips. While for such a girl to
insist that she was going on a recruiting cruise around Malaita was
positive self-sacrilege.

He always perturbedly harked back to her feminineness. She could play
the piano far better than his sisters at home, and with far finer
appreciation--the piano that poor Hughie had so heroically laboured over
to keep in condition. And when she strummed the guitar and sang liquid,
velvety Hawaiian _hulas_, he sat entranced. Then she was all woman, and
the magic of sex kidnapped the irritations of the day and made him forget
the big revolver, the Baden-Powell, and all the re