think as I
do. I--I dread to marry a Frenchman. You know _le droit du mari_? A
French wife has no freedom."

I cited Madame Bapp, who chastised her spouse.

"He is no man, that _criquet!_" she said scornfully.

"I would be better off not to marry, if I had a real man who loved me,
and who would take me across the sea! What am I saying? The nuns
would be shocked. I do not know--oh, I do not know what it is that
tears at me! But I want to see the world, and I want a man to love me."

"Your islands here are more beautiful than any of the developed
countries," I said. "There are many thieves there, too, to take your
money."

"I have read that," she answered, "and I am not afraid. I am afraid
of nothing. I want to know a different life than here. I will at
least go to Tahiti. I am tired of the convent. The nuns talk always
of religion, and I am young, and I am half French. We die young,
most of us, and I have had no pleasure."

I saw her black eyes, as she puffed her cigarette, shining with her
vision. Some man would put tears in them soon, I thought, if she
chose that path.

Would she be happy in Tahiti? If she could find one of her own kind,
a half-caste, a paragon of kindness and fidelity, she might be. With
the white she would know only torture. There is but one American that
I know who has made a native girl happy. Lovina, who keeps the Tiare
Hotel in Papeite and who knows the gossip of all the South Seas,
told me the story one day after he had come to the hotel to fetch
two dinners to his home. He had a handsome motor-car, and the man
himself was so clean-looking, so precise in every word and motion,
that I spoke of the contrast to the skippers, officials, and
tourists who lounged about Lovina's bar.

"He is a strange one, that man," said Lovina. "Two years ago I have
nice girl here, wait on bar, look sweet, and I make her jus' so my
daughter. I go America for visit, and when I come back that girl
ruin'. That American take her 'way, and he come tell me straight he
couldn't help it. He jus' love her--mad. He build her fine house,
get automobile. She never work. Every day he come here get meals
take home."

That tall, straight chap, his hair prematurely gray, his face sad,
had made the barmaid the jewel of a golden setting. He devoted
himself and his income solely to her. Stranger still, he had made
her his legal wife.

But she is an exception rare as rain in Aden. These native girls of
mixed blood, livin