chair in
the kitchen, surrounded by a Chinese cook and two or three
native girls, giving her orders, chatting sociably with all
and sundry, and tasting the savoury messes she devised. When
she wished to do honour to a friend she cooked the dinner with
her own hands. Hospitality was a passion with her, and there
was no one on the island who need go without a dinner when
there was anything to eat at the Hotel de la Fleur. She never
turned her customers out of her house because they did not pay
their bills. She always hoped they would pay when they could.
There was one man there who had fallen on adversity, and to
him she had given board and lodging for several months.
When the Chinese laundryman refused to wash for him without
payment she had sent his things to be washed with hers. She could
not allow the poor fellow to go about in a dirty shirt, she said,
and since he was a man, and men must smoke, she gave him a
franc a day for cigarettes. She used him with the same
affability as those of her clients who paid their bills once a week.

Age and obesity had made her inapt for love, but she took a
keen interest in the amatory affairs of the young. She looked
upon venery as the natural occupation for men and women, and
was ever ready with precept and example from her own wide experience.

"I was not fifteen when my father found that I had a lover,"
she said. "He was third mate on the <i Tropic Bird>.
A good-looking boy."

She sighed a little. They say a woman always remembers her
first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always
remember him.

"My father was a sensible man."

"What did he do?" I asked.

"He thrashed me within an inch of my life, and then he made me
marry Captain Johnson. I did not mind. He was older,
of course, but he was good-looking too."

Tiare -- her father had called her by the name of the white,
scented flower which, they tell you, if you have once smelt,
will always draw you back to Tahiti in the end, however far
you may have roamed -- Tiare remembered Strickland very well.

"He used to come here sometimes, and I used to see him walking
about Papeete. I was sorry for him, he was so thin, and he
never had any money. When I heard he was in town, I used to
send a boy to find him and make him come to dinner with me.
I got him a job once or twice, but he couldn't stick to
anything. After a little while he wanted to get back to the
bush, and one morning he would be gon