showily-furnished cottage, whose Nottingham-lace curtains, varnished
golden-oak chairs and ingrain carpet spoke of attempts at mail-order
beautification. Sitting on a horse-hair sofa, hard and slippery, I
drank wine and ate mangoes, while opposite me Mademoiselle N----'s
mother sat in stiff misery on a chair. She was a withered Marquesan
woman, barefooted and ugly, dressed in a red cotton garment of the
hideous night-gown pattern introduced by the missionaries, and her
eyes were tragedies of bewilderment and suffering, while her
toothless mouth essayed a smile and she struggled with a few words
of bad French.

Though Mademoiselle N---- was most hospitable, she was not at ease,
and I knew it was because of the appearance of her mother, this
woman whom her father had discarded years before, but to whom the
daughter had shown kindness since his death. The mother appeared
more at ease with her successor, a somewhat younger Marquesan woman,
who waited on us as a servant, and seemed contented enough.
Doubtless the two who had endured the moods of Liha-Liha had many
confidences now that he was gone.

I had to describe America to Mademoiselle N----, and the inventions
and social customs of which she had read. She would not want to live
in such a big country, she said, but Tahiti seemed to combine
comfort with the atmosphere of her birthplace. Perhaps she might go
to Tahiti to live.

As I took my hat to leave, she said:

"I have been told that they are separating the lepers in Tahiti and
confining them outside Papeite in a kind of prison. Is that so?"