After a time the trail widened into a road and I saw before us a queer enclosure.  At first sight I thought it a wild-animal park.  There were small houses like cages and a big, box-like structure in the center, all enclosed in a wire fence, a couple of acres in all.  Drawing nearer, I saw that the houses were cabins painted in gaudy colors, and that the white box was a marble tomb of great size.  Each slab of marble was rimmed with scarlet cement, and the top of the tomb, under a corrugated iron roof, was covered with those abominable bead-wreaths from Paris.

Like the humbler Marquesans who have their coffins made and graves dug before their passing, Mademoiselle N——­’s father had seen to it that this last resting-place was prepared while he lived, and he had placed it here in the center of his plantation, before the house that had been his home for thirty years.  With something of his own crude strength and barbaric taste, it stood there, the grim reminder of her white father to the girl in whose veins his own blood mingled with that of the savage.

She looked at it without emotion, and after I had surveyed it, we dismounted and she led me into her house.  It was a neat and 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?”

“Not a prison,” I replied.  “The government has built cottages for them in a little valley.  Don’t you think it wise to segregate them?”

She did not reply, and I rode away.