s Miss Jacksonville primly. "I don't
know much about her history, but she looks to me as though she had been
on the stage. She's frightfully frivolous--not at all one of our
representative people."

"Ah!" says the visitor. "Is she pretty?"

"Well," admits Miss Jacksonville, "I suppose she _is_--in a fast way.
But she's all rouged and she overdresses. Her bathing suits are too
short at the bottom and her evening gowns are too short at the top. Yes,
and even at that, she has a trick of letting the shoulder straps slip
off and pretending she doesn't know it has happened."

"What's her name?"

"Mrs. Palm-Beach."

"Oh," says the visitor. "I've heard of her. She's always getting into
the papers. Tell me more."

Miss Jacksonville purses her lips and raises her eyebrows. "Really," she
says, "I don't like to talk scandal."

"Oh, come on! Do!" pleads the visitor. "Is she bad--bad and beautiful
and alluring?"

"Judge for yourself," says Miss Jacksonville sharply. "She keeps that
enormous place of hers shut up except for about two months or so in the
winter, when she comes down gorgeously dressed, with more jewelry than
is worn by the rest of the neighborhood put together. Few Southerners go
to her house. It's full of rich people from all over the North."

"Is she rich?"

"You'd think so to look at her--especially if you didn't know where she
got her money. But she really hasn't much of her own. She's a grafter."

"How does she manage it?"

"Men give her money."

"But why?"

"Because she knows how to please the rich. She understands them. She
makes herself beautiful for them. She plays, and drinks, and gambles,
and dances with them, and goes riding with them in wheel chairs by
moonlight, and sits with them by the sea, and holds their hands, and
gets them sentimental. There's some scent she uses that is very
seductive--none of the rest of us have been able to find out exactly
what it is."

"But how does she get their money?"

"She never tells a hard-luck story--you can't get money out of the kind
she goes with, that way. She takes the other tack. She whispers to them,
and laughs with them, and fondles them, and makes them love her, and
when they love her she says: 'But dearie, be reasonable! Think how many
people love me! I like to have you here, you fat old darling with the
gold jingling in your pockets! but I can't let you sit with me unless
you pay. Yes, I'm expensive, I admit. But don't you love this scent