light; everywhere they went they saw people,
people, people: richly dressed people, gay people, people who knew
quantities of other people; yet among them all was not one single being
that they had ever seen before. After several days of this, father met a
man he knew--a business friend from Akron. A precious lot of good that
did! Why didn't father know the two young men who sat last night at the
next table in the dining room? Even those two would have done just now.
Clearly they had been mad to know her too, for they were likewise
feeling desolate. Perhaps mother can get father to scrape up an
acquaintance with them. But alas, before this plan can be set in motion,
the two young men have formed their own conclusions as to what Palm
Beach is like when you do not know anybody in the place. They have
departed. Next day, when mother enters daughter's room to say good
night, she finds her weeping; and next day, to father's infinite relief,
they start for home. So it has gone with many a bush-league belle.

Even the Mrs. Jumpkinson-Joneses, satiated though they be with private
cars, press notices, and Palm Beach, can hardly fail to be sensible to
the almost delirious beauty of the scene at bathing hour.

Nowhere is the sand more like a deep, warm dust of yellow gold; nowhere
is there a margin of the earth so splashed with spots of brilliant
color: sweaters, parasols, bathing suits, canvas shelters--blue, green,
purple, pink, yellow, orange, scarlet--vibrating together in the sharp
sunlight like brush marks on a high-keyed canvas by Sorolla; nowhere has
flesh such living, glittering beauty as the flesh of long, white, lovely
arms which flash out, cold and dripping, from the sea; nowhere does
water appear less like water, more like a flowing waste of liquid
emeralds and sapphires, held perpetually in cool solution and edged with
a thousand gleaming, flouncing strings of pearls.

Over the beach lies a layer of people, formed in groups, some of them
costumed for the water, some for the shore; some of them known to the
great lady, many of them unknown to her. The groups are forever
shifting as their members rise and run down to the sea, or come back
shiny and dripping, to fling themselves again upon the warm sand, roll
in it, or stretch out in lazy comfort while their friends shovel it over
them with their hands. Now one group, or another, will rise and form a
grinning row while a snap-shot is taken; now they recline again; now