“Good-morning!  You see I am trying my sun-bath.  I am convinced it relieves my spine.”  The same remark has introduced seven morning conversations.

“And my gout has shot from the index toe to the ring toe.  I feared my slipper was damp, and I am roasting it here.  But, dear ma’am, I pity you so with your spine!  Tried acupuncture?”

[Illustration:  The Thoroughfare.]

The patient probably hears the word as Acapulco.  For she answers, “No, but I tried St. Augustine last winter.  Not a morsel of good.”

Among these you encounter sometimes lovely, frail, transparent girls, who come down with cheeks of wax, and go home in two months with cheeks of apple.  Or stout gentlemen arriving yellow, and going back in due time purple.

Once a hardened siren of many watering-places, large and blooming, arrived at Atlantic City with her latest capture, a stooping invalid gentleman of good family in Rhode Island.  They boated, they had croquet on the beach, they paced the shining sands.  Both of them people of the world and past their first youth, they found an amusement in each other’s knowing ways and conversation that kept them mutually faithful in a kind of mock-courtship.  The gentleman, however, was evidently only amusing himself with this travesty of sentiment, though he was never led away by the charms of younger women.  After a month of it he succeeded in persuading her for the first time to enter the water, and there he assisted her to take the billows in the gallant American fashion.  Her intention of staying only in the very edge of the ocean he overruled by main force, playfully drawing her out where a breaker washed partially over her.  As the water touched her face she screamed, and raised her arm to hide the cheek that had been wet.  She then ran hastily to shore, and her friend, fearing some accident, made haste to rejoin her.  His astonishment was great at finding one of her cheeks of a ghastly, unhealthy white.  Her color had always been very high.  That afternoon she sought him and explained.  She was really an invalid, she said calmly, and had recently undergone a shocking operation for tumor.  But she saw no reason for letting that interfere with her usual summer life, particularly as she felt youth and opportunity making away from her with terrible strides.  Having a chance to enjoy his society which might never be repeated, fearing lest his rapid disease should carry him away from before her eyes, she had concluded to make the most of time, dissemble her suffering, and endeavor to conceal by art the cold bloodlessness of her face.  This whimsical, worldly heroism happened to strike the gentleman strangely.  He was affected to the point of proposing marriage.  At the same time he perceived with some amazement that his disease had left him:  the, curative spell of the region had wrought its enchantment upon his system.  They were wedded, with roles reversed—­he as the protector and she as the invalid—­and were truly happy during the eighteen months that the lady lived as his wife.