for money.' That turribil talk, and she jus' fell down. Good for her,
I think."

Lovaina seldom rode in her automobile, which she kept primarily for
renting to guests for country tours. She had had for years a carriage,
a surrey, drawn by one horse, which had grown old and rickety with
the vehicle. The driver was a mute, Vava, his name meaning dumb in
Tahitian, and the English and Americans called him the Dummy. He was
attached to Lovaina as a child to his mother--a wayward, jealous,
cloudy-minded child, who almost daily broke into fits of anger
over incidents misunderstood by his groping mentality, and because
of his incommunicable feelings. The hotel was in a fearsome uproar
when Vava fell into a tantrum, women patrons afraid of his possible
actions and men threatening to club him into a mild frame of mind. I
doubt if any one there could have subdued him physically, for he was
a thick-bodied man in his thirties, with a stamina and a strength
incredibly developed. I had seen him once lift over a fence a barrel
of flour, two hundred pounds in weight, and without full effort. His
skin was very dark, his facial expression one of ire and frustration,
but of conscious superiority to all about him. He had had no aids to
overcome his natal infirmity of deafness and consequent dumbness, none
of the educational assistance modern science lends these unfortunates,
no finger alphabet, or even another inarticulate for sympathy. He was
like the mutes of history, of courts and romances, condemned to suffer
in silence the humor and contempt of all about him, though he felt
himself better than they in body and in the understanding of things,
which he could not make them know. This repression made him often
like a wild beast, though mostly he was half-clown and half-infant
in his conduct. He had a gift of mimicry incomparably finer than any
professional's I knew of. This, with his gestures, stood him instead