The other was about twenty-two years old, slender, kohl-eyed,
and black-tressed. She was dressed in the gayest colors of
bourgeois fashion in San Francisco, with jade ear-rings and diamond
ornaments. Her face was of a lemon-cream hue, with dark shadows
under her long-lashed eyes. Her form was singularly svelt, curving,
suggestive of the rounded stalk of a young cocoa-palm, her bosom
molded in a voluptuous reserve. Her father, a clergyman, had cornered
the vanilla-bean market in Tahiti, and she was bringing an automobile
and a phonograph to her home, a village in the middle of Tahiti.

One night when a Hawaiian hula was played on the phonograph, she
danced alone for us. It was a graceful, insinuating step, with
movements of the arms and hands, a rotating of the torso upon the
hips, and with a tinge of the savage in it that excited the Swiss,
the raw-food advocate. Hallman was also in the social hall, and,
after waltzing with her several times, had persuaded her to dance
the hula. He clapped his hands loudly and called out:

"Maitai!"

That is Tahitian for bravo, and I saw a look in Hallman's face that
recalled the story by the Englishman of the jungle trail. He was
always intent on his pursuit.

Was I hypercritical? There was Leung Kai Chu with the sharks, and the
nature man left behind! The one had lost his dream of returning to
Tahiti, in which the Chinese might freely have lived, and the other
had thrown away life because he could not enter the America that
the other wanted so madly to leave. The lack of a piece of paper