“It is three years since I have known of you.  That is long.

“Give me that word I ask for this woman.  I cannot go to marry in Atuona.  That is what my heart wants, but it is far and the money is great.  The woman would pay and would come with me.  I say no.  I am proud.  I have shame.  I am a Marquesan.

“I live with that woman now.  I am not married.  It is forbidden.  The American mutoi (policeman) may take hold of me.  Five months I am with this woman of mine.  The mutoi has a war-club that is hard as stone.

  “Give me quickly the paper to marry her.  I await your word.

  “My word is done.  I am at Philadelphia, New York Hotel.  A.P.A.  Dieu. 
  Coot pae, mama.”

Mauitetai had read the letter many times.  It was wonderful to hear from her son after three years and pleasant to know he had found a woman.  She must be a haoe, a white woman.  Were the women of that island, Chile, white?

I said that they ran the color scale, from blond to brown, from European to Indian, but that this Jeanette who was a tattooer, a maker of pictures on canvas, no doubt an artist of merit, must be pale as a moonbeam.  Those red peppers that were hot on the tongue came from Chile, I said, and there were heaps of gold there in the mountains.

My Darling Hope would know what kind of a valley was Philadelphia.

It was the Valley of Brotherly Love.  It was a very big valley, with two streams, and a bay.  No, it was not near Tahiti.  It was a breadfruit season away from Atuona, at the very least.

What could a hotel be?  The New York hotel in which her poor son lived?

I did not know that hotel, I told her, but a hotel was a house in which many persons paid to live, and some hotels had more rooms than there were houses in all the Marquesas.

What!  In one house, under one roof?  By my tribe, it was true.

Did I know this woman?  I was from that island and I had been in that valley.  I must have seen her.

I replied that I knew a Jeanette who answered the description beautiful, but that she was not from Chile.

Now, My Darling Hope knit her brow.  Why would the mutoi take hold of her son, as he feared?

I soothed her anxiety.  The mutoi walked up and down in front of the hotel, but he would not bother her son as long as her son could get a few piasters now and then to hand to him.  The woman was rich, and would not miss a trifling sum, five or ten piasters a month for the mutoi.

But why was it forbidden for her son to live with Jeanette, being not married to her?

That was our law, but it was seldom enforced.  The mutois were fat men who carried war-clubs and struck the poor with them, but her son was tapu because of Jeanette’s money.

She was at ease now, she said.  Her son could not marry without her permission.  No Marquesan had ever done so.  She would send the word by the next schooner, or I might take it with me to my own island and hand it to her son.  He could then marry.