“She just throws things together,” Mary complained.  “She doesn’t even try.  She can dress in fifteen minutes, and when she goes swimming she beats the boys out of the dressing rooms.”  Mary was honest and incredulous in her admiration.  “I can’t see how she does it.  No one could dare those colours, but they look just right on her.”

“She’s always threatened that when I became finally flat broke she’d set up dressmaking and take care of both of us,” Tom contributed.

Frederick, looking over the top of a newspaper, was witness to an illuminating scene; Mary, to his certain knowledge, had been primping for an hour ere she appeared.

“Oh!  How lovely!” was Polly’s ready appreciation.  Her eyes and face glowed with honest pleasure, and her hands wove their delight in the air.  “But why not wear that bow so and thus?”

Her hands flashed to the task, and in a moment the miracle of taste and difference achieved by her touch was apparent even to Frederick.

Polly was like her father, generous to the point of absurdity with her meagre possessions.  Mary admired a Spanish fan—­a Mexican treasure that had come down from one of the grand ladies of the Court of the Emperor Maximilian.  Polly’s delight flamed like wild-fire.  Mary found herself the immediate owner of the fan, almost labouring under the fictitious impression that she had conferred an obligation by accepting it.  Only a foreign woman could do such things, and Polly was guilty of similar gifts to all the young women.  It was her way.  It might be a lace handkerchief, a pink Paumotan pearl, or a comb of hawksbill turtle.  It was all the same.  Whatever their eyes rested on in joy was theirs.  To women, as to men, she was irresistible.

“I don’t dare admire anything any more,” was Mary’s plaint.  “If I do she always gives it to me.”

Frederick had never dreamed such a creature could exist.  The women of his own race and place had never adumbrated such a possibility.  He knew that whatever she did—­her quick generosities, her hot enthusiasms or angers, her birdlike caressing ways—­was unbelievably sincere.  Her extravagant moods at the same time shocked and fascinated him.  Her voice was as mercurial as her feelings.  There were no even tones, and she talked with her hands.  Yet, in her mouth, English was a new and beautiful language, softly limpid, with an audacity of phrase and tellingness of expression that conveyed subtleties and nuances as unambiguous and direct as they were unexpected from one of such childlikeness and simplicity.  He woke up of nights and on his darkened eyelids saw bright memory-pictures of the backward turn of her vivid, laughing face.

IV