When she said, “I glad see you,” there was a glow of amiability, an alluring light in her countenance, that drew one irresistibly to her, and her immense, shapely hand enveloped one’s own with a pressure and a warmth that were overpowering in their convincement of her good heart and illimitable generosity.
Lovaina was only one fourth Tahitian, all the remainder of her racial inheritance being American; but she was all Tahitian in her traits, her simplicity, her devotion to her friends, her catching folly as it flew, and her pride in a new possession.
One morning I got up at five o’clock and went to the bath beside the kitchen. It was a shower, and the water from the far Fautaua valley the softest, most delicious to the body, cool and balmy in the heat of the tropic. Coming and going to baths here, whites throw off easily the fear of being thought immodest, and women and men alike go to and fro in loin-cloths, pajamas, or towels. I wore the pareu, the red strip of calico, bearing designs by William Morris, which the native buys instead of his original one of tapa, the beaten cloth made from tree bark or pith.
I met Lovaina coming out of the shower, a sheet about her which could not cover half of her immense and regal body. She hesitated—I was almost a stranger,—and in a vain effort to do better, trod on the sheet, and pulled it to her feet. I picked it up for her.
“I shamed for you see me like this!” she said.
I was blushing all over, though why I don’t know, but I faltered:
“Like a great American Beauty rose.”
“Faded rose too big,” exclaimed Lovaina, with the faintest air of coquetry as I hastily shut the door.
A little while later, when I came to the dining-room for the first breakfast, I met Lovaina in a blue-figured aahu of muslin and lace, a close-fitting, sweeping nightgown, the single garment that Tahitians wear all day and take off at night, a tunic, or Mother Hubbard, which reveals their figures without disguise, unstayed, unpetticoated. Lovaina was, as always, barefooted, and she took me into her garden, one of the few cultivated in Tahiti, where nature makes man almost superfluous in the decoration of the earth.
“This house my father give me when marry,” said Lovaina. “My God! you just should seen that arearea! Las’ all day, mos’ night. We jus’ move in. Ban’s playin’ from war-ship, all merry drinkin’, dancin’. Never such good time. I tell you nobody could walk barefoot one week, so much broken glass in garden an’ street.”