nderstand. Life was too
clearly simple to her. It was only the youth who was arguing with him,
the youth with youth's pure-minded and invincible reasoning. Hers was
only the boy's soul in a woman's body. He looked at her flushed, eager
face, at the great ropes of hair coiled on the small head, at the rounded
lines of the figure showing plainly through the home-made gown, and at
the eyes--boy's eyes, under cool, level brows--and he wondered why a
being that was so much beautiful woman should be no woman at all. Why in
the deuce was she not carroty-haired, or cross-eyed, or hare-lipped?

"Suppose we do become partners on Berande," he said, at the same time
experiencing a feeling of fright at the prospect that was tangled with a
contradictory feeling of charm, "either I'll fall in love with you, or
you with me. Propinquity is dangerous, you know. In fact, it is
propinquity that usually gives the facer to the logic of youth."

"If you think I came to the Solomons to get married--" she began
wrathfully. "Well, there are better men in Hawaii, that's all. Really,
you know, the way you harp on that one string would lead an unprejudiced
listener to conclude that you are prurient-minded--"

She stopped, appalled. His face had gone red and white with such
abruptness as to startle her. He was patently very angry. She sipped
the last of her coffee, and arose, saying,--

"I'll wait until you are in a better temper before taking up the
discussion again. That is what's the matter with you. You get angry too
easily. Will you come swimming? The tide is just right."

"If she were a man I'd bundle her off the plantation root and crop, whale-
boat, Tahitian sailors, sovereigns, and all," he muttered to himself
after she had left the room.

But that was the trouble. She was not a man, and where would she go, and
what would happen to her?

He got to his feet, lighted a cigarette, and her Stetson hat, hanging on
the wall over her revolver-belt, caught his eye. That was the devil of
it, too. He did not want her to go. After all, she had not grown up
yet. That was why her logic hurt. It was only the logic of youth, but
it could hurt damnably at times. At any rate, he would resolve upon one
thing: never again would he lose his temper with her. She was a child;
he must remember that. He sighed heavily. But why in reasonableness had
such a child been incorporated in such a woman's form?

And as he continued to star