"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.
"I wonder," I ventured next, "if you came across anyone who had met Ganguin."
"Go—what?" she asked.
"That amazing Peruvian-Frenchman," I went on, with a certain foolish desperation. "Ganguin. He Lived in Tahiti."
"How comically geographical you are!" was all she replied, and again a silence brooded over our plates.
"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."