“Spik Furanche?” she begged.

“Oui, oui!” said the red-faced lady.  “Dooze cocktail!  Vous savez cocktail, a la mode des ancients?  Gin, oon dash bittair, lem’ et soda!”

“Mais, madame, douze cocktail!” and the half-caste Chinese girl held up all her fingers and added two more.  “Vous n’etes que quatre ici!  Quatre cocktails, n’est-ce pas?”

“Dooze gin, dooze Manhattan?  My heavens!  They ought to understand my French in this out-of-the-way place when they do in Paris.  Listen!  Dooze is two in French,” and she held up two pudgy fingers.  But Temanu was gone and returned with four cocktails made after her own liking.

All the girls, Atupu, Iromea, Pepe, Maru, Tetua, and Mme. Rose and Mama-Maru, helped in the service, some beginning with shoes and stockings, but soon slipping them off as the crowd grew and their feet became weary.  Lovaina herself moved happily about the salle-a-manger telling her friends that she was a grandmother.  A letter had given the information that her daughter had a child.  She was a doting parent, and we all must toast the newborn.  Two grave professors of the University of California, ichthyologists or entomologists, sat entranced at the unconventionality of the scene, drinking vin ordinaire and gazing at the Tahitian girls, or eating breadfruit, raw fish, and taro, as if they were on Mars and did not know how they got there.

I saw an entry in Lovaina’s day-book on the table: 

“Germani to Fany 3 feathers.”

This was a charge made by Atupu against a Dane for three cocktails.  He took his meals at Mme. Klopfer’s restaurant.  Her first name is Fanny, and Atupu thinks all men not English, French, or Americans, are Germans; so she identified the Dane as the German who went to Fanny’s for his meals.

Lovaina said to me: 

“I hear you look one house that maybe you rent.  You don’t get wise if you rent from that French woman.  I don’t say nothing about her, but you know her tongue?  So sharp jus’ like knife.  All time she have trouble.  Can’t rent her house so sharp.  Some artist he rent; she take box, peep over see what he do jus’ because he have some girl.  Nobody talk her down.  No, I take back.  Jus’ one French woman who know to swear turribil.  This swear woman she call her turribil name and say, ’Everybody don’t know you was convict in Noumea for killing one man for money.’  That turribil talk, and she jus’ fell down.  Good for her, I think.”

Lovaina seldom rode in her automobile, which she kept primarily for renting to guests for country tours.  She had had for years a carriage, a surrey, drawn by one horse, which had grown old and rickety with the vehicle.  The driver was a mute, Vava, his name meaning dumb in Tahitian, and the English and Americans called him the Dummy.  He was attached to Lovaina as a child to his mother—­a wayward, jealous, cloudy-minded child, who almost daily broke into fits of anger over incidents misunderstood by