“My God!  Brien,” she said in desperation, “all time I jus’ like that crazee way.  One time one engineer big steamship come here, he ask me keep two thousan’ dollar for him.  I busy jus’ like always, an’ I throw behin’ that couch I sit on.  My God! he come back I fore-get where I put.  One day we look hard.  I suffer turribil, but the nex’ day I move couch and find money.  Was n’t that funny?”

I suggested we try the couch again, but though we turned up a number of lost odds and ends, it was not the cache of my funds.  By way of cheering her, I ordered a rum punch, and when she went to crack the ice, a gleam of remembrance came to her, and, lo! my money was found in the reserve butter supply in the refrigerator, where she had artfully placed it out of harm’s way.  It was quite greasy, but intact.

The first breakfast at the Tiare began at 6:30, but lingered for several hours.  It was of fruit and coffee and bread; papayas, bananas, oranges, pineapples, and alligator-pears, which latter the French call avocats, the Mexicans ahuacatl, and were brought here from the West Indies.  To this breakfast male guests dropped in from the bath in pajamas, but the dejeuner a la fourchette, or second breakfast at eleven, was more formal, and of four courses, fish, bacon and eggs, curry and rice, tongues and sounds, beefsteak and potatoes, feis, roast beef or mutton, sucking pig, and cabbage or sauer-kraut.  For dessert there was sponge- or cocoanut-cake.  All business in Papeete opened at seven o’clock and closed at eleven, to reopen from one until five.  Dinner at half-past six o’clock was a repetition of the late breakfast except that a vegetable or cabbage soup was also served.

Two Chinese youths, To Sen and Hon Son, were the regular waiters, but were supplemented by Atupu, Iromea, Pepe, Akura, Tetua, Maru, and Juillet, all Tahitian girls or young women who had a mixed status of domestics, friends, kinfolk, visitors, and hetairae, the latter largely in the sense of entertainers.  I doubt if they were paid more than a trifle, and they were from the country districts or near-by islands, moths drawn by the flame of the town to soar in its feverish heat, to singe their wings, and to grow old before their time, or to grasp the opportunity to satiate their thirst for foreign luxuries by semi-permanent alliances with whites.

Lovaina’s girls!  How their memory must survive with the guests of the Tiare Hotel!  One read of them in every book of travel encompassing Tahiti.  One heard of them from every man who had dropped upon this beach.  Once in Mukden, Manchuria, I sat up half the night while the American consul and a globe-trotter painted for me the portraits of Lovaina’s girls.

I was atop a disorderly camel named Mark Twain nosing about the Sphinx when my companion remarked that that stony-faced lady looked a good deal like Temanu of Lovaina’s.  Then I had to have the whole story of Lovaina and her household.  I have heard it away from Tahiti a dozen times and always different.