another island.--"

As the Dutchman talked, blowing his smoke bursts into the moonlight, the
vision of that Marquesan woman came again before me. I perceived her,
under the heavy procession of his words, a figure of astounding romance,
an adventuress incomparable, a Polynesian bacchante. No, I saw her as
the missionary of a strange thing, crossing oceans, daring thirst and
gale and teeth of sharks, harrying deeper and deeper into the outseas
of mystery that small, devoted, polyandrous company of husbands, at once
her paddlers, cooks, flunkies, watchdogs, music makers. "Queen
Daughter!" Royal and self-anointed priestess of that unheard-of dance,
the tribal dance, no doubt, of some tiny principality rearing a cone in
the empty hugeness of the sea.--I couldn't get away from my time and
race. I found myself wondering what she got out of it--in some
jungle-bowered, torch-lit "high place," to feel again the toppling of
ten thousand years? Was it something to feel the voluptuous and
abominable beauty of that rhythm going out of her flesh, beat by beat,
and entering into the flesh of those astounded and half-hostile
watchers? Perhaps.--

"They tell me that she has also danced at Papeete--before the white men
of the steamships," the Dutchman was informing us.

At that, from the step, from the moon-blue huddle of the castaway, there
came a sound. With a singular clarity of divination I built up the
thought, the doubt, the bitter perturbation in the fellow's mind. The
woman had danced then at Papeete, the cross roads, the little Paris of
mid-seas. And before the white men from steamers--the white men that go
back!

Moved by projects deeper and more devious than ours, the Dutchman made
haste to cover up what seemed to have been an overshot. Frankly, he
turned his attention to the outcast.

"By the God, then, my dear Signet, have you considered?"

He knew well enough that Signet had "considered." He could see as well
as I that Signet was a changed man. But he must "pile it on."

"There, my dear sir, you have it. That 'hunch!' That 'sure fire!' Do you
think I do not know that New York of yours? Such a dance as that! You
must believe me. If you were but a man of energy, now--" With the utmost
deliberation he launched upon a tirade of abuse. "But, no, you are not a
man of energy, not a man to take things in your hands. The obstacles are
too big. Those three husbands! You might even take that woman, that
lovely, royal dancing wo