South Seas--Her strange ménage--The Dummy--A one-sided tryst--An
old-fashioned cocktail--The Argentine training ship.

The Tiare Hotel was the center of English-speaking life in
Papeete. Almost all tourists stayed there, and most of the white
residents other than the French took meals there. The usual traveler
spent most of his time in and about the hotel, and from it made
his trips to the country districts or to other islands. Except for
two small restaurants kept by Europeans, the Tiare was the only
eating-place in the capital of Tahiti unless one counted a score
of dismal coffee-shops kept by Chinese, and frequented by natives,
sailors, and beach-combers. They were dark, disagreeable recesses,
with grimy tables and forbidding utensils, in which wretchedly made
coffee was served with a roll for a few sous; one of them also offered
meats of a questionable kind.

The Tiare Hotel was five minutes' walk from the quay, at the junction
of the rue de Rivoli and the rue de Petit Pologne, close by Pont du
Remparts. It was a one-storied cottage, with broad verandas, half
hidden in a luxuriant garden at the point where two streets come
together at a little stone bridge crossing a brook--a tiny bungalow
built for a home, and stretched and pieced out to make a guest-house.

I was at home there after a few days as if I had known no other
dwelling. That is a distinctive and compelling charm of Tahiti,
the quick possession of the new-comer by his environment, and his
unconscious yielding to the demands of his novel surroundings,
opposite as they might be to his previous habitat.

Very soon I was filled with the languor of these isles. I hardly