etty in her
way--"elegant" an American would have called her--but she lacked
animation. However, the South Seas...! Anyone fresh from the Pacific
must have enough to tell to see soup, fish and _entree_ safely
through.

I began by remarking that she must find London a very complete change
after the sun and placidity that she had come from.

"It's certainly noisier," she said; "but we had our share of rain."

"I thought it was always fine there," I remarked; but she laughed a
denial and relapsed into silence.

She was one of those women who don't take soup, and this made the
economy of her utterances the more unfair.

Racking my brain for a new start I fell back on those useful fellows,
the authors. Presuming that anyone who had lived in that fascinating
region--the promised land (if land is the word) of so many of us who
are weary of English climatic treacheries--would be familiar with the
literature of it. I went boldly to work.

"The first book about the South Seas that I ever read," I said, "was
BALLANTYNE'S _Coral Island_."

"Indeed!" she replied.

I asked her if she too had not been brought up on BALLANTYNE, and she
said no. She did not even know his name.

"He wrote for boys," I explained rather lamely.

"I read poetry chiefly as a girl," she said.

"But surely you know STEVENSON'S _Island Nights' Entertainment_?"
I said.

No, she did not. Was it nice?

"It's extraordinary," I said. "It gives you more of the atmosphere
of the South Seas than any other work. And Louis BECKE--you must have
read him?" I continued.

No, she had not. She read very little. The last book she had read was
on spiritualism.

"Not even CONRAD?" I pursued. "No one has so described the calms and
storms of the Pacific."

No, she remembered no story called _Conrad_.

I was about to explain that CONRAD was the writer, not the written;
but it seemed a waste of words, and we fell into a stillness broken
only by the sound of knife and fork.

"Hang it! you shall talk," I said to myself; and then aloud, "Tell me
all about copra. I have longed to know what copra is; how it grows,
what it looks like, what it is for."

"You have come to the wrong person," she replied, with wide eyes. "I
never heard of it. Or did you say 'cobra'? Of course I know what a
cobra is--it's a snake. I've seen them at the Zoo."

I put her right. "Copra, the stuff that the traders in the South Seas
deal in."

"I never heard of it," she said. "But then