When Girls Will Be

Boys

TTAVING an Eton crop, a slim figure * and a fondness for donning masculine attire, I am sometimes landed quite in voluntarily into some merry—and perhaps not-so-merry—situations, especially when travelling among unsophisticated natives in Fiji.

Their amazement and disapproval cause me some silent chuckles. Those who know me greet me with effusiveness and smiles if my garb is feminine. But if it is not —woe betide me! I am subjected to a battery of glances that would make the Sphinx wince.

On one occasion, clothed coolly in shorts and shirt and a beloved straw hat, which had once been an aristocrat, and still retained a fragment of its former glory.

I went gaily along to a planters’ meeting with Dad, the chairman.

Maidenly decorum forbade my attend ing thus arrayed, so I besought me a place in which to change. The village was full of huts, but I was unknown. However, I soon espied a kindly looking woman, and, in my halting Fijian, I explained my dilemma to her. She eyed me up and

down and the kindly expression vanished.

She pointed coldly to a hut in which there were several men.

I could not understand her peculiar attitude.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I want to change in your hut.”

With very bad grace she led the way inside her house. We were followed by a crowd of little boys, who were in terested spectators.

I crowded myself into a corner and proceeded, under the embarrassingly direct gaze of the youthful audience, to replace my shorts, etc., with a frock.

The eyes of the audience nearly dropped out.

“Ha! Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho! Ho!” chortled the woman, her face all nice and beaming again.

“Why the mirth?” quoth I.

“You’re a girl,” they chorused.

“I could have told you that,” I retorted —then suddenly remembered that I hadn’t and thereby caused a heap of unnecessary confusion.

However, I noticed that when I re turned to re-don my travelling gear there were no spectators.

EM.