"Hawaii!" I interrupted. "You never told me you had been to Hawaii."
"I don't tell everything," he replied. "But the happiest hours of my existence were spent in a little village two or three miles from Honolulu, on the coast, where we used to go now and then for a day's fun. It was called—let me get it right—it was called Tormo Tonitui—and there were pleasure-gardens there and the most fascinating girls." His eyes took on a far-away wistfulness.
"Yes, yes?" I said.
"Fascinating brown girls," he said, "who played that banjo-mandolin thing they all play, and sang mournful luxurious songs, and danced under the lanterns at night. And the bathing! There's no bathing here at all. There you can stay in the sea air day if you like. It's like bathing in champagne. Sun and surf and sands—there's nothing like it." He sighed rapturously.
"Well, I can't help saying again," I interrupted, "that it's a most extraordinary thing that, after knowing you all these years, you have never told me a word about Honolulu or the South Seas or this wonderful pleasure-garden place called—what was the name of it?"
He hesitated for a moment. "Morto Notitui," he then replied.
"I don't think that's how you had it before," I said; "surely it was Tormo Tonitui?"
"Perhaps it was," he said. "I forget. Those Hawaiian names are very much alike and all rather confusing. But you really ought to go out there. Why don't you cut everything for a year and get some sunshine into your system? You're fossilising here. We all are. Let's be gamblers and chance it."
"I wish I could," I said. "Tell me some more about your life there."
"It was wonderful," he went on—wonderful. I'm not surprised that STEVENSON found it a paradise."