as covered with gold boxes and bottles and
brushes; scents and powders and pastes. If he moved out, Gaby de Lys
might have moved in and lacked nothing. He was a boulevardier, his
clothes from Paris, conforming not at all to the sartorial customs
of Tahiti, and his varnished boots and alpine hat, with his saffron
automobile, marked him as a person. In that he resembled Higby,
an Englishman in Papeete, who wore the evening dress of London
whenever a steamship came in, though it might be noon, and on the
king's birthday and other British feasts put it on when he awoke. He
was the only man who went to dinner at the Tiare in the funeral garb
of society. He said he was setting up a proper standard in Tahiti. It
was suspected really that he was short of clothes, with perhaps only
one or two cotton suits, and that when those were soiled he had to
resort to full dress during the laundering.

While David and I inspected the house and grounds, McHenry and
Llewellyn sat at the wine. Polonsky had a curious and wisely chosen
household. His butler was a Javanese, his chef a Quan-tung Chinese,
his valet a Japanese, his chambermaid a Martinique negress, and his
chauffeur an American expert. These had nothing in common and could
not ally themselves to cheat him, he said.

As I came back to the front veranda McHenry and Llewellyn were
talking excitedly.

"I've had my old lady nineteen years," said McHenry, boastfully, "and
she wouldn't speak to me if she met me on the streets of Papeete. She
wouldn't dare to in public until I gave her the high sign. You're a
bloody fool makin' equals of the natives, and throwin' away money on
those cinema girls the way you do."

This incensed Llewellyn, who was of chiefly Tahitian blood, and
who claimed kings of Wales as his ancestors. Although extremely
aristocratic in his attitude toward strangers, his native strain
made him resent McHenry's rascally arrogance as a reflection upon
his mother's race.

"Shut up, Mac!" he half shouted. "You talk too much. If it hadn't been
for that same old lady of yours, you'd have died of delirium-tremens
or fallen into the sea long ago."

"Aye," said the trader, meditatively, "that vahine has saved my life,
but I'm not goin' to sacrifice my dignity as a white man. If ye let go
everything, the damn' natives'll walk over ye, and ye'll make nothin'
out o' them."

Lovaina had occasionally called me Dixey, and had explained that I was
the "perfec' im'ge" of a man o