If she gave a quick movement, it was only to set the tea-cozy in place. If there came a flush athwart her pale cheek, it might have been a chance ray of the deep western sun, filtering through the trellis.
"Yes?" she said.
"I am quite clear about these marriages. Quite clear. I cannot say I advocate them, but in any such community as ours they have always been inevitable. The missionary merely provides the service of the church, as in duty bound. Who shall deny that he does the Lord's work toward unifying the island type?" He blinked nervously, balked at his own lead and started again.
"As to any stigma that may attach to such a union—really, you know, it's not as if our natives had the least negroid taint. They are Caucasians. Yes, my dear, that is scientifically true. The Polynesian people are an early migration of the great Caucasian race. Besides which, they are very fair to look upon—undeniably—very fair indeed."
She sat transfixed, but the most amazing part was to come....
"Consider, moreover," he pleaded—actually it was as if he pleaded—"considered the position of the resident white in these isles, far from the restraints and manifold affairs of his own world. Life is apt to become very dreary, very monotonous for him. Ah, yes, Matilda, you could scarce imagine, but it palls—it palls. He requires—er—diversion, as it were, companionship, a personal share in such charm and—er—sensuous appeal as flourish so richly on all sides of him. Have you ever thought of the question in that light? You haven't, of course, my dear. But consider the temptation."
He ended by retreating hastily behind his teacup, quite unnecessarily, as it proved. Miss Matilda was in no condition just then to deploy the expected maidenly emotions. "Consider!" Had she not? Had she been thinking of anything else these past feverish weeks? What other exile could have taught any secrets of monotony or dreariness to the daughter of a lone missionary?
Chapel, school, home and chapel again, and in this round each daily move foreseen and prescribed. An hour for getting up and an hour for lying down; an hour for eating and an hour for praying; for turning a page and for threading a needle. No escape from the small formal proprieties in which her father had molded their lives. No friend, no neighbor, no acquaintance except native pupils and servants. No stimulus except the moral discourse of a reverend tyrant. No interests except the same petty worries and the same money needs....
From where she sat in the veranda she could see no single object to break the deadly sameness of it. There were the same sticks of unsuitable furniture in the same immutable order, the same rugs at the same angles; the same dishes, the same books, the same pictures on the walls—"The Prodigal's Return," chromolithograph, in a South Pacific isle! And all this not merely happening so, as it might very well happen elsewhere. Here it was laboriously achieved, a triumph of formulated rectitude, transplanted bodily for a reproof and an example to the heart of the riotous tropics....
"Why did you say there was need to explain to me, father?" she managed to ask at last.