Father is the leading merchant of his town; mother the social arbiter; daughter the regnant belle.  Father definitely didn’t wish to come here, nor was mother anxious to, but daughter made them.  Often she has read the lists of prominent arrivals at Palm Beach and seen alluring pictures of them taken on the sand.  She has dreamed of the place, and in her dreams has seemed to hear the call of Destiny.  Who knows? may it not be at Palm Beach that she will meet him?—­the beautiful and wealthy scion of a noble house who (so the fortune teller at the Elks’ Club bazaar told her) will rescue her from the narrow life at home, and transport her, as his bride, into a world of wonder and delight, and footmen in knee-breeches.  Daughter insisted on Palm Beach.  So mother got a lot of pretty clothes for daughter, and father purchased several yards of green and yellow railroad tickets, and off they went.  They arrived at Palm Beach.  They walked the miles of green carpeted corridor.  They were dazed—­as every one must be who sees them for the first time—­at the stunning size of the hotels.  They looked upon the endless promenade of other visitors.  They went to the beach at bathing hour, to the cocoanut grove at the time for tea and dancing, in wheel chairs through the jungle trail and Reve d’Ete, to the waiters’ cake walk in the Poinciana dining room, to the concert at the Breakers, to the palm room, and to the sea by moonlight; 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.