succeed in pumping out of me that capital bit of information?  Little does she know the long prison sentence at “hard labor” that stares me in the face for any such slip; to say nothing of my naturally incommunicative disposition.  Or is she ashamed to let me know the truth?—­unaware that all such information goes in at my ears and down my pencil to the pink card before me like a message over the wires, leaving no more trace behind.  Surely she must know that I care not a pencil-point whether she is eighteen or fifty-two, nor remember which one minute after her screen door has slammed behind me—­unless she has caused me to glance up in wonder at her silvering temples of thirty-five when she simpers “twenty-two”—­and to set her down as forty to be on the safe side.  Oh now, please, ladies, do not understand me as accusing the American wives of Paraiso in general of this weakness.  The large majority were quite pleasant, frank, and overflowing with cheery good sense.  But the percentage who were not was far larger than I, who am also an American, was pleased to find it.

But doubly astonishing were the few cases of lying by proxy.  A “clean-cut,” college-graduated civil engineer of thirty-two whom one would have cited as an example of the best type of American, gave all data concerning himself in an unimpeachable manner.  His wife was absent.  When the question of her age arose he gave it, with the slightest catch in his voice, as twenty.  Now that might be all very well.  Men of thirty-two are occasionally so fortunate as to marry girls of twenty.  But a moment later the gentleman in question finds himself announcing that his wife has been living on the Zone with him since 1907; and that she was born in New England!  Thus is he tripped over his own clothes-line.  For New England girls do not marry at fifteen; mother would not let them even if they would.

I, too, had gradually worked my way high up among the nondescript cabins on the upper rim of Paraiso that seem on the very verge of pitching headlong into the noisy, smoky canal far below with the jar of the next explosion, when one sunny mid-afternoon I caught sight of Renson dejectedly trudging down across what might be called the “Maiden” of Paraiso, back of the two-story lodge-hall.  I took leave of my ebony hostess and descended.  Renson’s troubles were indeed disheartening.  Back in the jungled fringe of the town he had fallen into a swarm of Martiniques, and Renson’s French being nothing more than an unstudied mixture of English and Spanish, he had not gathered much information.  Moreover negro women from the French isles are enough to frighten any virtuous young Marine.