“You are late, my friend,” the princess went on, with a note of pity in her soft voice.  “My mother remembered the days Loti depicted in ‘Rarahu.’  My grandmother knew little Tarahu of Bora-Bora of whom he wrote.  Viaud was then a midshipman.  We did not call him Loti, but Roti, our coined word for a rose, because he had rosy cheeks.  But he could not call himself Roti in his novel, for in French, his language, that meant roasted, and one might think of boeuf a la roti.  We have no L in Tahitian.  We also called him Mata Reva or the Deep-Eyed One.  Tarahu was not born on Bora-Bora, but right here in Mataiea.”

She lay at full length, her uptilted face in her hands, and her perfect feet raised now and then in unaware accentuation of her words.

“What Tahitian women there were then!  Read the old French writers!  None was a pigmy.  When they stood under the waterfall the water ran off their skins as off a marble table.  Not a drop stayed on.  They were as smooth as glass.”

Fragrance of the Jasmine sighed.

“Aue!  Helas!”

I had it in my mouth to say that she was as beautiful and as smooth-skinned as any of her forebears.  She was as enticing as imaginable, her languorous eyes alight as she spoke, and her bare limbs moving in the vigor of her thoughts.  But I could not think of anything in French or English not banal, and my Tahitian was yet too limited to permit me to tutoyer her.  She was an islander, but she had seen the Midnight Follies and the Bal Bullier, the carnival in Nice, and once, New Year’s Eve in San Francisco.  An Italian and a Scandinavian prince had wooed her.

I spoke of Loti again, and of other writers’ comments upon the attitude of women in Tahiti toward man.

The princess sat up and adjusted her hei of ferns.  She studied a minute, and then she said: 

“I have long wanted to talk with an intelligent American on that subject; with some one who knew Europe and his own country and these islands.  There is a vast hypocrisy in the writing and the talking about it.  Now, Maru (I already had been given my native name), the woman of Tahiti exercises the same sexual freedom as the average white man does in your country and in England or France.  She pursues the man she wants, as he does the woman.  Your women pursue, too, but they do it by cunning, by little lies, by coquetry, by displaying their persons, by flattery, and by feeding you.

“The Tahitian woman makes the first advances in friendship openly, if she chooses.  She arranges time and place for amours as your women do.  She does not take from the Tahitian man or from the foreigner his right to choose, but she chooses herself, too.  I feel sure that often an American woman would give hours of pain to know well a certain man, but makes no honest effort to draw him toward her.  They have told me so!”

I got up, and standing beside her, I quoted: 

“Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and silence.”