ve of the rounded stalk of a young cocoa-palm, her bosom
molded in a voluptuous reserve. Her father, a clergyman, had cornered
the vanilla-bean market in Tahiti, and she was bringing an automobile
and a phonograph to her home, a village in the middle of Tahiti.

One night when a Hawaiian hula was played on the phonograph, she
danced alone for us. It was a graceful, insinuating step, with
movements of the arms and hands, a rotating of the torso upon the
hips, and with a tinge of the savage in it that excited the Swiss,
the raw-food advocate. Hallman was also in the social hall, and,
after waltzing with her several times, had persuaded her to dance
the hula. He clapped his hands loudly and called out:

"Maitai!"

That is Tahitian for bravo, and I saw a look in Hallman's face that
recalled the story by the Englishman of the jungle trail. He was
always intent on his pursuit.

Was I hypercritical? There was Leung Kai Chu with the sharks, and the
nature man left behind! The one had lost his dream of returning to
Tahiti, in which the Chinese might freely have lived, and the other
had thrown away life because he could not enter the America that
the other wanted so madly to leave. The lack of a piece of paper
had killed him. Was it that happiness was a delusion never to be
realized? If the pundit had bribed the immigration authorities, as
I had known many to do, he might now have been studying the strange
religion and ethics which had caused the whites to steal so much of
China, to force opium upon it at the cannon's mouth, to kill tens
of thousands of yellow men, and to raise to dignities the soldiers
and financiers whom he despised, as had Confucius and Buddha. And if
that white of the sandals had kept his shirt on in Tahiti, he might
be lying under his favorite palm and eating breadfruit and bananas.

People have come to be afraid to say or even to think they are
happy for a bare hour. We fear that the very saying of it will
rob us of happiness. We have incantations to ward off listening
devils--knocking on wood, throwing salt over our left shoulders,
and saying "God willing."

What was I to find in Tahiti? Certainly not what Loti had with Rarahu,
for that was forty years ago, when the world was young at heart, and
romance was a god who might be worshiped with uncensored tongue. But
was not romance a spiritual emanation, a state of mind, and not people
or scenes? I knew it was, for all over the earth I had pursued it,