"It is life."
There was a pause. "He never let me keep a dog or a cat about the house. But after a time I learned the ways of the parrakeets, and they would come down to me like doves in the stories. I never made any effort to touch them; so by and by they learned to light fearlessly on my arms 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?"