Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI--TEMPEST

It was the first time Sheldon had been at close quarters with an
American girl, and he would have wondered if all American girls
were like Joan Lackland had he not had wit enough to realize that
she was not at all typical. Her quick mind and changing moods
bewildered him, while her outlook on life was so different from
what he conceived a woman's outlook should be, that he was more
often than not at sixes and sevens with her. He could never
anticipate what she would say or do next. Of only one thing was he
sure, and that was that whatever she said or did was bound to be
unexpected and unsuspected. There seemed, too, something almost
hysterical in her make-up. Her temper was quick and stormy, and
she relied too much on herself and too little on him, which did not
approximate at all to his ideal of woman's conduct when a man was
around. Her assumption of equality with him was disconcerting, and
at times he half-consciously resented the impudence and bizarreness
of her intrusion upon him--rising out of the sea in a howling
nor'wester, fresh from poking her revolver under Ericson's nose,
protected by her gang of huge Polynesian sailors, and settling down
in Berande like any shipwrecked sailor. It was all on a par with
her Baden-Powell and the long 38 Colt's.

At any rate, she did not look the part. And that was what he could
not forgive. Had she been short-haired, heavy-jawed, large-
muscled, hard-bitten, and utterly unlovely in every way, all would
have been well. Instead of which she was hopelessly and
deliciously feminine. Her hair worried him, it was so generously
beautiful. And she was so slenderly and prettily the woman--the
girl, rather--that it cut him like a knife to see her, with quick,
comprehensive eyes and sharply imperative voice, superintend the
launching of the whale-boat through the surf. In imagination he
could see her roping a horse, and it always made him shudder.
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