ABSTRACT
There was one thing which Rarahu was already beginning to feel, and which she was fated to feel bitterly later; a thing she was incapable of formulating with any precision in her own mind, and yet more of expressing in the terms of her primitive tongue. She apprehended vaguely that there must be gulfs, in the intellectual order, fixed between Loti and herself, whole worlds of undreamed-of ideas and knowledge. She already appreciated the difference of our race, of our notions, of our lightest emotions. On the most elementary details of life our ideas differed widely. Loti, though dressed as a Tahitian and speaking her language, was still to her a Paoupa—that is to say, one of the men who come from the impossible lands beyond the ocean, one of the men who, within the last few years, have brought so many undreamed-of changes and unforeseen novelties into the stagnancy of Polynesia. 58Then, too, she knew that Loti would soon go away, never to return—go away to his own remote country. She had no conception of those bewildering distances,—and Tahaapaïru compared them to that which divides Fataoua from the moon and the stars.
