“And when I was in such moods he would gravely look me over, gravely feel my pulse, examine my tongue, gravely dose me with castor oil, and gravely put me to bed early with hot stove-lids, and assure me that I’d feel better in the morning. Early to bed! Our wildest sitting up was nine o’clock. Eight o’clock was our regular bed-time. It saved kerosene. We did not eat dinner at Nahala—remember the great table at Kilohana where we did have dinner? But Husband George and I had supper. And then he would sit close to the lamp on one side the table and read old borrowed magazines for an hour, while I sat on the other side and darned his socks and underclothing. He always wore such cheap, shoddy stuff. And when he went to bed, I went to bed. No wastage of kerosene with only one to benefit by it. And he went to bed always the same way, winding up his watch, entering the day’s weather in his diary, and taking off his shoes, right foot first invariably, left foot second, and placing them just so, side by side, on the floor, at the foot of the bed, on his side. “He was the cleanest man I ever knew. He never wore the same undergarment a second time. I did the washing. He was so clean it hurt. He shaved twice a day. He used more water on his body than any _kanaka_. He did more work than any two _haoles_. And he saw the future of the Nahala water.” “And he made you wealthy, but did not make you happy,” Martha observed. Bella sighed and nodded. “What is wealth after all, Sister Martha? My new Pierce-Arrow came down on the steamer with me. My third in two years. But oh, all the Pierce-Arrows and all the incomes in the world compared with a lover!—the one lover, the one mate, to be married to, to toil beside and suffer and joy beside, the one male man lover husband . . . ” Her voice trailed off, and the sisters sat in soft silence while an ancient crone, staff in hand, twisted, doubled, and shrunken under a hundred years of living, hobbled across the lawn to them. Her eyes, withered to scarcely more than peepholes, were sharp as a mongoose’s, and at Bella’s feet she first sank down, in pure Hawaiian mumbling and chanting a toothless _mele_ of Bella and Bella’s ancestry and adding to it an extemporized welcome back to Hawaii after her absence across the great sea to California. And while she chanted her _mele_, the old crone’s shrewd fingers _lomied_ or massaged Bella’s silk-stockinged legs from ankle and calf to knee and thigh.