The company arrived in automobiles, conspicuous among them Hinoe Pomare, the big hobbledehoy son of Prince Hinoe, and, next to his father, heir to the throne.  With him was his sister, Tetuanui, who was departing for Raratonga, and her husband.  He was a brother of Cowan, the prize-fighter, and in their honor was the luncheon.  Introduced to all by the chief of Mataiea, I was asked to sit with them.  The group was extraordinarily interesting, for besides the prince’s heir and his sister, Chief Tetuanui, and his brother-in-law Charlie Ling, was Paraita, son of a German schooner captain, who was adopted by Pomare V, and Tinau, another adopted son of the late king, who owned, and ran for hire, a motor-car.  There were other men, but among the women, all of whom sat below the humblest man, myself, was the Princesse de Joinville of Moorea, mother of Prince Hinoe, and grandmother of the youth at the head of the table, and of the boy, Ariipae, who attended to the chief’s garden.

This grandmother, known as Vahinetua Roriarii, was one of the very last survivors among the notable figures of the kingdom.  She had a cigarette in the corner of her sunken mouth, but she tossed it away when she and Haamoura, the chief’s wife, kissed each other on both cheeks in the French way.  The Princesse de Joinville was tottering, but with something in her face, a disdain, a trace of power, that attracted me before I knew her rank or history.  Her once raven hair was streaked with gray, she trembled, and her step was feeble; but all her weaknesses and blemishes impressed me as the disfigurement by age and abrasion of a beautiful and noble statue.  She was more savage-looking than any modern Tahitian woman, more aboriginal, and yet more subtle.  I once contemplated in the jungle of Johore an old tigress just trapped, but marked and wounded by the pit and the blows of her captors.  She looked at me coolly, but with a glint in her eye that meant, I thought, contempt for all that had occurred since her last hour of freedom.

In the curious network of lines all over the worn face of the princess there were suggestions of the sensual lure that had made her the mistress of the court; a gentle but pitiful droop to the mouth that I had noticed persisting in the roues and sirens of Asia after senility had struck away all charm.  The princess refused a third glass of wine at the table, but smoked incessantly, and listened absent-mindedly to the music and the songs.  Her thoughts may have been of those mad nights of orgy which Davey, the dentist, and Brault, the composer, had described.  Her cigarettes were of native tobacco wrapped in pandanus leaf, as the South American wraps his in corn husk.  They were short; merely a few puffs.