“By George, she does,” Stanley Patterson concurred. “Reminds me of Estrellita. Torso just well enough forward, slender waist, not too lean in the stomach, and with muscles like some lad boxer’s armouring that stomach to fearlessness. She has to have them to carry herself that way and to balance the back muscles. See that muscled curve of the back! It’s Estrellita’s.” “How tall would you say?” his wife queried. “There she deceives,” was the appraised answer. “She might be five-feet-one, or five-feet-three or four. It’s that way she has of walking that you described as almost about to fly.” “Yes, that’s it,” Mrs. Patterson concurred. “It’s her energy, her seemingness of being on tip toe with rising vitality.” Stanley Patterson considered for a space. “That’s it,” he enounced. “She _is_ a little thing. I’ll give her five-two in her stockings. And I’ll weigh her a mere one hundred and ten, or eight, or fifteen at the outside.” “She won’t weigh a hundred and ten,” his wife declared with conviction. “And with her clothes on, plus her carriage (which is builded of her vitality and will), I’ll wager she’d never impress any one with her smallness.” “I know her type,” his wife nodded. “You meet her out, and you have the sense that, while not exactly a fine large woman, she’s a whole lot larger than the average. And now, age?” “I’ll give you best there,” he parried. “She might be twenty-five, she might be twenty-eight . . . ” But Stanley Patterson had impolitely forgotten to listen. “It’s not her legs alone,” he cried on enthusiastically. “It’s the all of her. Look at the delicacy of that forearm. And the swell of line to the shoulder. And that biceps! It’s alive. Dollars to drowned kittens she can flex a respectable knot of it . . . ” * * * * * No woman, much less an Ida Barton, could have been unconscious of the effect she was producing along Waikiki Beach. Instead of making her happy in the small vanity way, it irritated her. “The cats,” she laughed to her husband. “And to think I was born here an almost even third of a century ago! But they weren’t nasty then. Maybe because there weren’t any tourists. Why, Lee, I learned to swim right here on this beach in front of the Outrigger. We used to come out with daddy for vacations and for week-ends and sort of camp out in a grass house that stood right where the Outrigger ladies serve tea now. And centipedes fell out of the thatch on us, while we slept, and we all ate _poi_ and _opihis_ and raw _aku_, and nobody wore much of anything for the swimming and squidding, and there was no real road to town. I remember times of big rain when it was so flooded we had to go in by canoe, out through the reef and in by Honolulu Harbour.”