mulatto, and it is surprising to see how closely the
skins of some more ardent members of the "Browning Club," as this group
is called, match those of their chair boys. The underlying theory of the
"Browning Club" is that a triple-plated coat of tan, taken north in
March, advertises the wearer as having been at Palm Beach during the
entire winter, thus establishing him as a man not merely of means, but
of great endurance.

The women of Palm Beach seem to be divided into two distinct schools of
thought on the subject of tanning. While none of them compete with the
radicals of the "Browning Club," one may nevertheless observe that, in
evening dress, many young ladies reveal upon their necks, shoulders, and
arms, stenciled outlines of the upper margins of their bathing suits.
Ladies of the opposing school, upon the contrary, guard the whiteness of
their skins as jealously as the men of the "Browning Club" guard their
blackness. Rather than be touched with tan, many ladies of the latter
group deny themselves the pleasures of the surf. The parasols beneath
which they arrive upon the sands are not lowered until they are safely
seated beneath the green and blue striped canvas tops of their beach
chairs, and it may be observed that even then they are additionally
fortified against the light, by wide black hats and thick dark veils
draped to mask their faces up to the eyes; "harem" veils, they call
them--the name, however, signifying nothing polygamous.

A pleasant diversion at the beginning of the bathing hour occurs when
some mere one-horse millionaire from a Middle-Western town appears on
the beach with his family. He is newly arrived and is under the fond
delusion that he is as good as anybody else and that his money is as
good as any other person's money. Seeing the inviting rows of beach
chairs, he and his family plump into several of them. They are hardly
settled, however, when the man who attends to the beach chairs comes and
asks them to get out, saying that the chairs are reserved.

The other thinks the man is lying like a head waiter, and demands to
know for whom the chairs are reserved.

In reply the beach-chair man mentions, with suitable deference, the name
of Mrs. Hopkinson Skipkinson Jumpkinson-Jones.

"Well," cries the Middle-Westerner, "Mrs. Jones isn't here yet, is she?
She can't use the chairs _now_, can she, if she isn't here?"

Even without this evidence that he does not grasp at all, the
seriousness