ve me, the magnates of Naapu were
a multicolored lot. A man might have been made by copra or by pearls--or
by blackbirding. We were a plutocracy; which means that so long as a man
had the house and the drinks, you asked no questions. The same rule
holds--allowing for their dizzier sense of figures--in New York and
Chicago. On the whole, I think we were more sensible. There is certainly
more difference between good food and bad than between five millions and
fifty (which, I take it, is a figure that buys immunity over here). I
don't think any man's hospitality would have ranked him permanently on
Naapu if his dinners had been uneatable. Though perhaps--to be
frank--drinks counted more than food as a measuring-rod of aristocracy.

Well, Follet trained with the people who received consignments of
champagne and good whiskey. And Stires did not. Anyhow, Stires was a
temperance man: he took only one or two drinks a day, and seldom went
beyond a modest gin-fizz. With the remarkable native punch, compounded
secretly and by unknown ways, but purchasable, and much esteemed by the
knowing, he never would have anything to do. Stires looked like a cowboy
and was, in truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery
outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel
of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small--a very
small--way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient
Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva
dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and
chickens and fish. The poultry she raised herself; for the fish, she was
a middleman between fishermen and householders. As she owned a
gramophone and one silk dress, it was clear that her business prospered.
Even Ching Po bought eggs of her, though there was a nameless,
uninterpreted hostility between them.

Let me give you, at once, the few facts I could gather about French Eva.
There were rumors a-plenty, but most of them sifted down to a little
residual malice. I confined my questionings to the respectable
inhabitants of Naapu; they were a very small circle. At last, I got some
sort of "line" on French Eva.

None within our ken fathered or mothered her. Old Dubois knew most about
her, but old Dubois, a semi-paralyzed colossus, "doped" most of the
time, kept his thick lips closed. "An excellent girl" was all that any
one could wring from him. As she had begun