As she came back across the lawn to the hau tree, Bella's eyes
dwelt upon the moving authenticity of her and of the blood of her,
and embraced her and loved her. Shorter than Bella was Martha, a
trifle, but the merest trifle, less queenly of port; but
beautifully and generously proportioned, mellowed rather than
dismantled by years, her Polynesian chiefess figure eloquent and
glorious under the satisfying lines of a half-fitting, grandly
sweeping, black-silk holoku trimmed with black lace more costly
than a Paris gown.
And as both sisters resumed their talk, an observer would have
noted the striking resemblance of their pure, straight profiles, of
their broad cheek-bones, of their wide and lofty foreheads, of
their iron-grey abundance of hair, of their sweet-lipped mouths set
with the carriage of decades of assured and accomplished pride, and
of their lovely slender eye-rows arched over equally lovely long
brown eyes. The hands of both of them, little altered or defaced
by age, were wonderful in their slender, tapering finger-tips,
love-lomied and love-formed while they were babies by old Hawaiian
women like to the one even then eating poi and iamaka and limu in
the house.
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