“Thanks,” says the visitor, “but just at the moment commerce doesn’t appeal to me.  Who lives beyond her?”

Miss Jacksonville sighs.  “There are some pleasant, rather attractive people named Ormonde, beyond,” she says, “and a lively family named Daytona next door to them.  Neither family is in business, like papa.  They just play all the time.  Then come a number of modest places, and after them, in the big yellow and white house with the palm trees all around it—­but I’d advise you to keep away from there!  Yes, you’d better go by that house.  On the other side of it, in another lovely house, live some nicer, simpler people named Miami.  Or if you like fishing, you might drop in on Mrs. Long-Key—­she’s wholesome and sweet, and goes out every day to catch tarpon.  Or, again, you might—­”

“What’s the matter with the people in the big yellow and white house surrounded by palm trees?  Why shouldn’t I go there?” asks the guest.

“A young widow lives there,” says 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.”