She greeted me with the eager artlessness of the child that she was.
She was on her way to the _vai puna_, the spring by the beach, she
said. Would I accompany her thither? And would I tell her of the
women of my people in the strange islands of the _Memke?_ They were
very far away, were they not, those islands? Farther even than Tahiti?
How deep beneath the sea could their women dive?

I answered these, and other questions, while we walked down the beach,
and I marveled at the unconscious grace of her movements. The chief
wonder of all these Marquesans is the beauty and erectness of their
standing and walking postures. Their chests are broad and deep,
their bosoms, even in girls of Vanquished Often's age, rounded,
superb, and their limbs have an ease of motion, an animal-like
litheness unknown to our clothed and dress-bound women.

Vanquished Often was the most perfect type of all these physical
perfections, a survival of those wondrous Marquesan women who addled
the wits of the whites a century ago. There was no blemish on her,
nor any feature one would alter.

Half a dozen of her comrades were lounging upon the sand when we
reached the _via puna_. Here an iron pipe in the mountain-side
tapped subterranean waters, and a hollowed cocoanut-tree gave them
exit upon the sand where salt waves flowed up to meet them. Long
lean curving cocoanuts arched above, and beneath their ribbons of
shade lay an old canoe, upon which sat those who waited their turn
to bathe, to fill calabashes, or merely to gossip.

For all time, they said, this had been the center of life in Vait-hua.
Old wives' tales had been told here for generations. The whalers