The rich colors of the pictures sang like bugle-notes among the shabby odds and ends of the studio.  A cot, a broken chair or two, a table smeared with paints, an old shoe, a pipe, and a sketch of the Seine, gave me La Moine in his European birthright, but the absence of any European comforts, the lack even of dishes and a lamp, told me that Montmartre would not know him again.  The eyes of the girl who lived on the canvases said that Le Moine was claimed by the Land of the War Fleet.

Turning from the dingy interior of his cabin, I saw in the sunlight beyond the door his model in the life.  Le Moine had not the brush to do her justice.  Vanquished Often, as Hinatini means, was perhaps thirteen years old, with a grace of carriage, a beauty and perfection of features, a rich coloring no canvas could depict.  Her skin was of warm olive hue, with tinges of red in the cheeks and the lips cherry-ripe.  Her eyes were dark brown, large, melting, childishly introspective.  Her hands were shapely, and her little bare feet, arched, rosy-nailed, were like flowers on the sand.  She wore the thinnest of sheer white cotton tunics, and there were flamboyant flowers in the shining dark hair that tumbled to her waist.

She greeted me with the eager artlessness of the child that she was.  She was on her way to the vai puna, the spring by the beach, she said.  Would I accompany her thither?  And would I tell her of the women of my people in the strange islands of the Memke? They were very far away, were they not, those islands?  Farther even than Tahiti?  How deep beneath the sea could their women dive?

I answered these, and other questions, while we walked down the beach, and I marveled at the unconscious grace of her movements.  The chief wonder of all these Marquesans is the beauty and erectness of their standing and walking postures.  Their chests are broad and deep, their bosoms, even in girls of Vanquished Often’s age, rounded, superb, and their limbs have an ease of motion, an animal-like litheness unknown to our clothed and dress-bound women.

Vanquished Often was the most perfect type of all these physical perfections, a survival of those wondrous Marquesan women who addled the wits of the whites a century ago.  There was no blemish on her, nor any feature one would alter.

Half a dozen of her comrades were lounging upon the sand when we reached the via puna.  Here an iron pipe in the mountain-side tapped subterranean waters, and a hollowed cocoanut-tree gave them exit upon the sand where salt waves flowed up to meet them.  Long lean curving cocoanuts arched above, and beneath their ribbons of shade lay an old canoe, upon which sat those who waited their turn to bathe, to fill calabashes, or merely to gossip.