A week later I met her one evening at Otupoto, that dividing place between the valleys of Taaoa and Atuona, where Kahuiti and his fellow warriors had trapped the human meat.  I had walked there to sit on the edge of the precipice and watch the sun set in the sea.  She came on horseback from her home toward the village, to spend Sunday with the nuns.  She got off her horse when she saw me, and lit a cigarette.

“What do you do here all alone?” she asked in French.  She never used a word of Marquesan to me.  I replied that I was trying to imagine myself there fifty years earlier, when the meddlesome white sang very low in the concert of the island powers.

“The people were happier then, I suppose,” she said meditatively, as she handed me her burning cigarette in the courteous way of her mother’s people.  “But it does not attract me.  I would like to see the world I read of.”

She sat beside me on the rock, her delicately-modeled chin on her pink palm, and gazed at the colors fading from vivid gold and rose to yellow and mauve on the sky and the sea.  The quietness of the scene, the gathering twilight, perhaps, too, something in the fact that I was a white man and a stranger, broke down her reserve.

“But with whom can I see that world?” she said with sudden passion.  “Money—­I have it.  I don’t want it.  I want to be loved.  I want a man.  What shall I do?  I cannot marry a native, for they do not think as I do.  I—­I dread to marry a Frenchman.  You know le droit du mari?  A French wife has no freedom.”

I cited Madame Bapp, who chastised her spouse.

“He is no man, that criquet!” she said scornfully.

“I would be better off not to marry, if I had a real man who loved me, and who would take me across the sea!  What am I saying?  The nuns would be shocked.  I do not know—­oh, I do not know what it is that tears at me!  But I want to see the world, and I want a man to love me.”

“Your islands here are more beautiful than any of the developed countries,” I said.  “There are many thieves there, too, to take your money.”

“I have read that,” she answered, “and I am not afraid.  I am afraid of nothing.  I want to know a different life than here.  I will at least go to Tahiti.  I am tired of the convent.  The nuns talk always of religion, and I am young, and I am half French.  We die young, most of us, and I have had no pleasure.”

I saw her black eyes, as she puffed her cigarette, shining with her vision.  Some man would put tears in them soon, I thought, if she chose that path.

Would she be happy in Tahiti?  If she could find one of her own kind, a half-caste, a paragon of kindness and fidelity, she might be.  With the white she would know only torture.  There is but one American that I know who has made a native girl happy.  Lovina, who keeps the Tiare Hotel in Papeite and who knows the gossip of all the South Seas, told me the story one day after he had come to the hotel to fetch two dinners to his home.  He had a handsome motor-car, and the man himself was so clean-looking, so precise in every word and motion, that I spoke of the contrast to the skippers, officials, and tourists who lounged about Lovina’s bar.