Then, too, she was so many-sided. Her knowledge of literature
and art surprised him, while deep down was the feeling that a girl who
knew such things had no right to know how to rig tackles, heave up
anchors, and sail schooners around the South Seas. Such things in her
brain were like so many oaths on her lips. While for such a girl to
insist that she was going on a recruiting cruise around Malaita was
positive self-sacrilege.
He always perturbedly harked back to her feminineness. She could play
the piano far better than his sisters at home, and with far finer
appreciation--the piano that poor Hughie had so heroically laboured over
to keep in condition. And when she strummed the guitar and sang liquid,
velvety Hawaiian _hulas_, he sat entranced. Then she was all woman, and
the magic of sex kidnapped the irritations of the day and made him forget
the big revolver, the Baden-Powell, and all the rest. But what right,
the next thought in his brain would whisper, had such a girl to swagger
around like a man and exult that adventure was not dead? Woman that
adventured were adventuresses, and the connotation was not nice. Besides,
he was not enamoured of adventure. Not since he was a boy had it
appealed to him--though it would have driven him hard to explain what had
brought him from England to the Solomons if it had not been adventure.
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