I met Lovaina coming out of the shower, a sheet about her which could not cover half of her immense and regal body.  She hesitated—­I was almost a stranger,—­and in a vain effort to do better, trod on the sheet, and pulled it to her feet.  I picked it up for her.

“I shamed for you see me like this!” she said.

I was blushing all over, though why I don’t know, but I faltered: 

“Like a great American Beauty rose.”

“Faded rose too big,” exclaimed Lovaina, with the faintest air of coquetry as I hastily shut the door.

A little while later, when I came to the dining-room for the first breakfast, I met Lovaina in a blue-figured aahu of muslin and lace, a close-fitting, sweeping nightgown, the single garment that Tahitians wear all day and take off at night, a tunic, or Mother Hubbard, which reveals their figures without disguise, unstayed, unpetticoated.  Lovaina was, as always, barefooted, and she took me into her garden, one of the few cultivated in Tahiti, where nature makes man almost superfluous in the decoration of the earth.

“This house my father give me when marry,” said Lovaina.  “My God! you just should seen that arearea!  Las’ all day, mos’ night.  We jus’ move in.  Ban’s playin’ from war-ship, all merry drinkin’, dancin’.  Never such good time.  I tell you nobody could walk barefoot one week, so much broken glass in garden an’ street.”

Her goodly flesh shook with her laughter, her darkening eyes suffused with happy tears at the memory, and she put her broad hand between my shoulders for a moment as if to draw me into the rejoicing of her wedding feast.  She led me about the garden to show me how she had from year to year planted the many trees, herbs, and bushes it contained.  It had set out to be formal, but, like most efforts at taming the fierce fecundity of nature in these seas, had become a tangle of verdure, for though now and then combed into some regularity, the breezes, the dogs, the chickens, and the invading people ruffled it, the falling leaves covered the grass, and the dead branches sighed for burial.  Down the narrow path she went ponderously, showing me the cannas, jasmine and rose, picking a lime or a tamarind, a bouquet of mock-orange flowers, smoothing the tuberoses, the hibiscus of many colors, the oleanders, maile ilima, Star of Bethlehem, frangipani, and, her greatest love, the tiare Tahiti.  There were snakeplants, East-India cherries, coffee-bushes, custard-apples, and the hinano, the sweetness of which and of the tiare made heavy the air.

I said that we had no flower in America as wonderful in perfume as these.

Lovaina stopped her slow, heavy steps.  She raised her beautiful, big hand, and arresting my attention, she exclaimed: 

“You know that ol’ hinano!  Ol’ time we use that Tahiti cologne.  Girl put that on pareu an’ on dress, by an’ by make whole body jus’ like flower.  That set man crazee; make all man want kiss an’ hug.”