ms and shoulders. And what a noise they made!
This is how I used to call them."

She pursed her lips and uttered a whistle, piercingly shrill and
high; and instantly she became the object of intense astonishment
on the part of the other diners. She was quite oblivious to the
sensation she had created.

The picture of her flashed across the doctor's vision magically.
The emerald wings, slashed with scarlet and yellow, wheeling and
swooping about her head, there among the wild plantain.

"I never told anybody," she went on. "An audience might have
frightened the birds. Only in the sunshine; they would not answer
my whistle on cloudy days."

"Didn't the natives have a name for you?"

She blushed. "It was silly."

"Go on, tell me," he urged, enchanted. Never was there another girl
like this one. He blushed, too, spiritually, as it were. He had
invited himself to dine with her merely to watch her table manners.
They were exquisite. Knowing the South Seas from hearsay and by
travel, he knew something of that inertia which blunted the
fineness, innate and acquired, of white men and women, the eternal
warfare against indifference and slovenliness. Only the strong
survived. This queer father of hers had given her everything but
his arms. "Tell me, what did they call you?"

"Well, the old Kanaka cook used to call me the Golden One, but the
natives called me the Dawn Pearl."

"The Dawn Pearl! Odd, but we white folks aren't half so poetical as
the yellow or the black. What did you do when your father went on
trips to other islands?"

"Took off my shoes and stockings and played in the lagoon."

"He made you wear shoes and stockings?"

"Always."

"What else did you do when alone?"

"I read the encyclopaedia. That is how I learned that there were
such things as novels. Books! Aren't they wonderful?"

The blind alley of life stretching out before her, with its secret
doorways and hidden menaces; and she was unconcerned. Books; an
inexplicable hunger to be satisfied. Somewhere in the world there
was a book clerk with a discerning mind; for he had given her the
best he had. He envied her a little. To fall upon those tales for
the first time, when the mind was fresh and the heart was young!

He became aware of an odd phase to this conversation. The
continuity was frequently broken in upon by diversory suppositions.
Take the one that struck him at this moment. Supposing that was it;
at least, a solution to part of this