She was certainly unlike any woman he had ever known or dreamed of.  So far as he was concerned she was not a woman at all.  She neither languished nor blandished.  No feminine lures were wasted on him.  He might have been her brother, or she his brother, for all sex had to do with the strange situation.  Any mere polite gallantry on his part was ignored or snubbed, and he had very early given up offering his hand to her in getting into a boat or climbing over a log, and he had to acknowledge to himself that she was eminently fitted to take care of herself.  Despite his warnings about crocodiles and sharks, she persisted in swimming in deep water off the beach; nor could he persuade her, when she was in the boat, to let one of the sailors throw the dynamite when shooting fish.  She argued that she was at least a little bit more intelligent than they, and that, therefore, there was less liability of an accident if she did the shooting.  She was to him the most masculine and at the same time the most feminine woman he had ever met.

A source of continual trouble between them was the disagreement over methods of handling the black boys.  She ruled by stern kindness, rarely rewarding, never punishing, and he had to confess that her own sailors worshipped her, while the house-boys were her slaves, and did three times as much work for her as he had ever got out of them.  She quickly saw the unrest of the contract labourers, and was not blind to the danger, always imminent, that both she and Sheldon ran.  Neither of them ever ventured out without a revolver, and the sailors who stood the night watches by Joan’s grass house were armed with rifles.  But Joan insisted that this reign of terror had been caused by the reign of fear practised by the white men.  She had been brought up with the gentle Hawaiians, who never were ill-treated nor roughly handled, and she generalized that the Solomon Islanders, under kind treatment, would grow gentle.

One evening a terrific uproar arose in the barracks, and Sheldon, aided by Joan’s sailors, succeeded in rescuing two women whom the blacks were beating to death.  To save them from the vengeance of the blacks, they were guarded in the cook-house for the night.  They were the two women who did the cooking for the labourers, and their offence had consisted of one of them taking a bath in the big cauldron in which the potatoes were boiled.  The blacks were not outraged from the standpoint of cleanliness; they often took baths in the cauldrons themselves.  The trouble lay in that the bather had been a low, degraded, wretched female; for to the Solomon Islander all females are low, degraded, and wretched.