It is a sweet, and pretty, and daring trick, not learned in a day,
nor learned at all without many a milder bump on the bottom or
close shave of fractured skull or broken neck. Here, on the spot
where the Bartons so beautifully dived, two days before a Stanford
track athlete had broken his neck. His had been an error in timing
the rise and subsidence of a wahine wave.
"A professional," Mrs. Hanley Black sneered to her husband at Ida
Barton's feat.
"Some vaudeville tank girl," was one of the similar remarks with
which the women in the shade complacently reassured one another--
finding, by way of the weird mental processes of self-illusion, a
great satisfaction in the money caste-distinction between one who
worked for what she ate and themselves who did not work for what
they ate.
It was a day of heavy surf on Waikiki. In the wahine surf it was
boisterous enough for good swimmers. But out beyond, in the
kanaka, or man, surf, no one ventured. Not that the score or more
of young surf-riders loafing on the beach could not venture there,
or were afraid to venture there; but because their biggest
outrigger canoes would have been swamped, and their surf-boards
would have been overwhelmed in the too-immense over-topple and
down-fall of the thundering monsters.
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