bound to be
sheer superlatives. There was nothing she could not do better than any
woman and than most men. Sing, play--bah!--as some rhetorician once
said of old Nap, competition fled from her. Swim! She could have made
a fortune and a name as a public performer. She was one of those rare
women who can strip off all the frills of dress, and in simple swimming
suit be more satisfying beautiful. Dress! She was an artist.

"But her swimming. Physically, she was the perfect woman--you know
what I mean, not in the gross, muscular way of acrobats, but in all the
delicacy of line and fragility of frame and texture. And combined with
this, strength. How she could do it was the marvel. You know the wonder
of a woman's arm--the fore arm, I mean; the sweet fading away from
rounded biceps and hint of muscle, down through small elbow and firm
soft swell to the wrist, small, unthinkably small and round and strong.
This was hers. And yet, to see her swimming the sharp quick English
overhand stroke, and getting somewhere with it, too, was--well, I
understand anatomy and athletics and such things, and yet it was a
mystery to me how she could do it.

"She could stay under water for two minutes. I have timed her. No man
on board, except Dennitson, could capture as many coins as she with a
single dive. On the forward main-deck was a big canvas tank with six
feet of sea-water. We used to toss small coins into it. I have seen her
dive from the bridge deck--no mean feat in itself--into that six-feet
of water, and fetch up no less than forty-seven coins, scattered
willy-nilly over the whole bottom of the tank. Dennitson, a quiet young
Englishman, never exceeded her in this, though he made it a point always
to tie her score.

"She was a sea-woman, true. But she was a land-woman, a
horsewoman--a--she was the universal woman. To see her, all softness of
soft dress, surrounded by half a dozen eager men, languidly careless of
them all or flashing brightness and wit on them and at them and through
them, one would fancy she was good for nothing else in the world.
At such moments I have compelled myself to remember her score of
forty-seven coins from the bottom of the swimming tank. But that was
she, the everlasting, wonder of a woman who did all things well.

"She fascinated every betrousered human around her. She had me--and I
don't mind confessing it--she bad me to heel along with the rest. Young
puppies and old gray dogs who ought to have kn