The meaningful looks (metaphor)
The narrator describes his life on Samoa, and remembers every person he was in contact with. One of these was the hotel’s figurehead Chaplin, and he was inclined to spirits. One day the narrator “yielded to his persistence and accepted his offer of another cocktail”. With this reminiscence the other pops up, and it is of Mr. Chaplin’s wife “giving him black looks”. The metaphor of ‘black looks’ means, that Mrs. Chaplin was angry and expressed it by watching the narrator.
The mask of jollity (metaphor)
The narrator noticed that Lawson was pretending and he was not a person he would be considered to be at the first sight. “He was jolly, but his jollity did not seem to me sincere; it was on the surface, a mask which he wore to deceive the world, and I suspected that it concealed a mean nature”. Lawson was wearing a “mask of jollity” to hide his inner sufferings.
The first impression (simile)
When Lawson saw Ethel for the first time at the pool “she looked more than ever like a wild creature of the water or the woods”. When the girl noticed him, she “noiselessly slid into the water. She vanished like a naiad startled by the approach of a mortal”. The similes intensify the romantic atmosphere and add poetic notes to the scene.
With nature around adding to her beauty (metaphor)
The author describes Ethel with the help of beautiful and poetic metaphors. She is an extremely pretty girl, and her youth and innocence are mirrored in the beauty of nature around.
“Next evening he went again to the pool. Ethel was there; and the mystery of the sunset, the deep silence of the water, the lithe grace of the coconut trees, added to her beauty, giving it a profundity, a magic, which stirred the heart to unknown emotions”.
Memories (metaphor)
Lawson was captivated by beauty and elegance of Ethel, and “scraps of poetry, half forgotten, floated across his memory, and vague recollections of the Greece he had negligently studied in his school days”. The girl made his mind work intensely.
Depth of a look (metaphor)
Lawson seemed to be a happy man, but it was pretended happiness, and the narrator noticed it as it was written in his eyes.
“I was startled by the expression in those fine somber eyes of his, an expression of intolerable anguish; they betrayed a tragic depth of emotion of which I should never have thought him capable. But the expression passed away and he smiled. His smile was simple and a little naive. It changed his face so that I wavered in my first feeling of aversion from him.”
