The Project Gutenberg eBook ofSun Hunting

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofSun HuntingThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Sun HuntingAuthor: Kenneth Lewis RobertsRelease date: April 21, 2022 [eBook #67896]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1922Credits: Chuck Greif, deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUN HUNTING ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Sun HuntingAuthor: Kenneth Lewis RobertsRelease date: April 21, 2022 [eBook #67896]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1922Credits: Chuck Greif, deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

Title: Sun Hunting

Author: Kenneth Lewis Roberts

Release date: April 21, 2022 [eBook #67896]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1922

Credits: Chuck Greif, deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUN HUNTING ***

SUN HUNTING

President Harding, an occasional sun-hunter, slices one into the palmettos on one of Miami Beach’s three links.

SUN HUNTINGAdventures and Observations among the Nativeand Migratory Tribes of Florida, including theStoical Time-Killers of Palm Beach, theGentle and Gregarious Tin-Cannersof the Remote Interior, and theVivacious and Semi-ViolentPeoples of Miami andIts PurlieusByKenneth L. RobertsAuthor ofWhy Europe Leaves HomeINDIANAPOLISTHE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANYPUBLISHERS

Adventures and Observations among the Nativeand Migratory Tribes of Florida, including theStoical Time-Killers of Palm Beach, theGentle and Gregarious Tin-Cannersof the Remote Interior, and theVivacious and Semi-ViolentPeoples of Miami andIts PurlieusByKenneth L. RobertsAuthor ofWhy Europe Leaves HomeINDIANAPOLISTHE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANYPUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1922By The Curtis Publishing CompanyCopyright, 1922By The Bobbs-Merrill CompanyPrinted in the United States of America.PRESS OFBRAUNWORTH & CO.BOOK MANUFACTURERSBROOKLYN, N. Y.ToJuan Ponce De Leonwho found in 1513That Florida wasn’t all it wasCracked Up to bebut who Liked it Well Enoughto Go BackThis Book is AppreciativelyDedicated

THE TIME-KILLERS

OF TIME-KILLING IN THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MANNER—AND OF ANCIENT AND MODERN AMERICAN TIME-SLAUGHTERERS

Peoplewho have any time to kill are usually filled with a deep and intense desire to kill it in some spot far removed from their usual haunts.

This desire is not so much due to their wish to avoid making a mess around the house as it is to the peculiar mental obsession known to the French as “homesickness for elsewhere.” French society has been afflicted for years with a passionate desire to be somewhere that it isn’t. A Parisian with time to kill aims to move up to the clear cold air of the mountains where he can killlots of it. When he gets to the mountains, it suddenly occurs to him that possibly he might find a little more time to kill at the seashore, where the eye may roam at will across the boundless and unobstructed waves. So he moves to the seashore and at once begins to suspect that in Paris one can find more weapons with which to cause time to die a lingering and horrible death. So he moves back to Paris, where he once more hunts restlessly for other means to kill time. He has the homesickness for elsewhere.

The English, too, have it to a marked degree. All Englishmen who have incomes larger than two hundred guineas a year own tea baskets with which they go off to distant heaths or popular woods on bank holidays and week-ends for the purpose of killing time and burying it with the appropriate funeral exercises. They are all the time running up to the moors for a bit of rough shooting, or over to Switzerland fora bit of sheeing, or off to a country-house for a bit of punting or Scotch-drinking, or down to Brighton for a week-end. An English week-end is sadly misnamed, inasmuch as it usually consists of Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, with a bit of Thursday and Tuesday thrown in for good measure.

Of late years, the American people have been growing increasingly proficient at time-killing. Forty years ago, the average American, confronted with a little extra time, didn’t know what to do with it. Usually he took it into the front parlor and sat around on haircloth furniture with it, and became so sick of it that he never wanted to see its face again. If he felt within him the primitive urge to take it somewhere and kill it, he hesitated to do so because the roads were bad, automobiles hadn’t been invented, and the South was only regarded as the place where the Civil War started. Distances were great. Few people cared totravel, because it was generally believed that a person who absented himself from business more than one working day out of every five years was a loose, dangerous and depraved character. One of the most exciting things to do forty years ago was to put on a striped flannel coat and play croquet on the front lawn.

To-day, however, America has caught the germs of “homesickness for elsewhere” from the French and English. Florida has been reclaimed from the swamps and the Indians, the small automobile has been put within the means of stevedores, cooks, second-story workers and moderately successful story-writers, and golf trousers may be worn in western towns without causing the wearer to be shot. A road is cursed fluently by an automobilist if it is bad enough to get his wheel-spokes muddy. The business man who can’t knock off work for two or three months a year is regarded pityingly as being either a back number,feeble-minded, or a poor man. All of these things being so, Americans with time to kill can take it farther from home and kill it with more thoroughness than any other people on earth. They go into their time-killing with more energy than do Europeans. The European is usually content to do his time-killing within three hundred miles of home. The American is never content unless he can travel from fifteen hundred to three thousand miles, and wind up with an orgy of time-killing that would make a professional executioner look by comparison like the president of a Dorcas society.

OF THE PASSAGE FROM WINTER TO SUMMER IN ONE DAY’S TIME—AND OF THE HABITAT OF SOME RARE SPECIMENS

Itis in Florida that the American time-killer may be found in all his glory; and the largest, most perfect and most brilliantly colored specimens are to be found at Palm Beach. It is at Palm Beach that one finds the very rare variety measuring twenty minutes from tip to tip.

One can best understand why it is that winter-bound northerners select Florida as the scene of their time-killing by following in their footsteps and boarding a Florida-bound night train in a northern city during a heavy blizzard.

Early the next morning, when one disentangles the bedclothes from his neck and elevates the trick shade of the sleeping-car window after the usual severe struggle, one finds that the snow has nearly disappeared.The eye is wearied by the flat plains of North Carolina, relieved only by negro shanties and scrub pines. By afternoon North Carolina has merged into South Carolina. The flatness continues with unbounded enthusiasm; but there is no snow and the air is milder. The pines are marked with peculiar herring-bone gashes, whence flows turpentine, the painter’s delight. Piney odors, vaguely reminiscent of tar soap, sheep dip and cold-remedies, float through the half-opened windows. Later that evening, as one returns to the dining-car to recover the hat which one has forgotten in the excitement of tipping the waiter, one hears frequent shrill frog-choruses from the pools beside the tracks. By midnight one is ringing for the porter to tear himself from his slumbers among the shoes in the smoking compartment and start the electric fans. One’s rest is troubled by the heat and the increasing shrillness of the frog-choruses.

On the second morning the rising sun discloses a limitless expanse of flatness, dotted with occasional palm trees and covered with a scrubby growth of near-palms or palmettos. The sun is hot and red. A black ribbon of asphalt road parallels the railroad; and at intervals along it appear flocks of flivvers nesting drowsily among the palms and the tin-can tourists. There is plenty of glaring white sand, and plenty of stagnant water. The air is full of swallows, and an occasional pelican flops languidly alongside the train, gazing pessimistically at the passengers.

The traveler perspires lightly and marvels at the thought that it was only night before last when he slipped on a piece of ice and got half a peck of snow down the back of his neck. He remembers that it is a great and glorious country—a fact which his contemplation of the antics of Congress had caused him to forget.

Occasionally the train flashes past little towns sitting hotly in the sun and sandamong a few orange and grapefruit trees. This is Florida, and the land looks as though it were worth about a nickel an acre—just as it has always looked until some one develops it and begins to sell off corner lots at a paltry five thousand dollars apiece.

Around breakfast time—a mere thirty-six hours since the train emerged from its northern blizzard and snow-drifts—the train crosses a shimmering strip of blue water and comes to rest beside a hotel that seems, at first glance, to be at least ten miles long. It stretches off so far into the distance that people up at the other end appear to be hull-down. In reality it is only about half a mile long, and only about five hundred times larger than the Mousam House at Kennebunk, Maine.

On the station platform are women in satin skirts, gauzy waists and diamond bracelets. Young men in white trousers dash up and down the platform on bicycles. The air is soft and balmy. Palm treesstretch off into the distance in every direction. Wheel-chairs, propelled by dignified-looking negroes who sit on bicycle-seats directly behind the chairs and pedal vigorously, move hither and yon in a stately manner. Through the palm trees one catches glimpses of white yachts riding at anchor on blue water.

A wheel-chair stops at the edge of the station platform. In it are seated a dignified gentleman in white flannels, and a gracious lady in a satin skirt and a sweater covered with neat lightning effects in red, green and orange zigzags. One wonders whether this can be J. Pierpont Morgan or Charley Schwab. Then one hears the gracious lady whisper excitedly to the dignified gentleman: “Do you suppose that’s Charley Schwab or J. Pierpont Morgan over there?” and hears the dignified gentleman reply in a hoarse undertone: “Shut up, or they’ll think we’re boobs!”

This is Palm Beach, the very center of the winter time-killing industry.

OF THE PECULIAR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TWO SIDES OF A LAKE—OF MONEY ODORS—AND OF THE QUESTERS AFTER CHARLEY SCHWAB

Palm Beachis a long narrow strip of land which is separated from the mainland by a long narrow body of water known as Lake Worth, and by a sudden increase in living expenses. On the mainland side of Lake Worth is the rising young city of West Palm Beach, where one is not afraid—as he usually is in Palm Beach—to offer a storekeeper or a newsboy a nickel lest he should regard it as some strange, unknown foreign coin. West Palm Beach is full of ordinary people who are unacquainted with wheel-chairs and think nothing of walking two or three blocks, or even as much as half a mile if the necessity arises. They frequently get along for days at a time without spendingmore than two dollars and eighty-five cents a day.

West Palm Beach has the same sort of climate that Palm Beach has, but the air of the place is somehow different. At Palm Beach one has the feeling that he is breathing the very same air that the world’s greatest bankers and society people are breathing, whereas over in West Palm Beach one doesn’t know or care who has been breathing the air. That is why so many people find the Palm Beach climate very invigorating, but always feel that the climate of West Palm Beach leaves them a little weak and tired.

Palm Beach, then, is a long narrow strip of land with the ocean on one side and Lake Worth on the other. The largest hotel, which has room for thirteen hundred paying guests at any one time, fronts on Lake Worth; while the next largest hotel is directly across the narrow strip of land, fronting on the ocean. In between are golflinks, and roadways edged with palms and avenues of towering, feathery, bluish-green Australian pines and simple little cottages that couldn’t have cost a cent more than forty or fifty thousand dollars, and modest little shacks that might have set their owners back half a million or so, and club-houses and bathing pavilions and more palms and broad white roadways and men in white flannels and women in diamonds and perfumery and clinging gowns—and more palms.

Over everything there is an odor of money. Every breeze that blows is freighted with its rich, fragrant musky smell; and every person that one encounters on the street or in a hotel lobby seems to be about to spend a lot of it or to have just finished spending a lot of it. Some people seem to like the odor and some don’t seem to care so much for it. Some, in fact, seem from their expressions to think that this money-odor has a great deal in common with smoldering rubber or asafetida.

The impression that Palm Beach is bound to make on any newcomer is one of general discomfort. Everybody seems to be staring critically and curiously at everybody else—due, of course, to the fact that almost everybody hopes or suspects that everybody else may prove to be Charley Schwab or Percy Rockefeller or E. T. Stotesbury or one of those prominent society people who part their names on the side.

People who enter and leave the hotel dining-room don’t seem to know what to do with their hands. They pretend to an embarrassing ease of manner, which leaves everybody acutely conscious that they are very uneasy. The people at the tables can’t keep their eyes off the people at other tables. The hotel lobbies are congested before lunch and after dinner with persons who have no interest in any scenery except that which other people are wearing. Although the beach at Palm Beach is many miles in length, all the bathers, near bathers and bather-watchers cram themselves each noon into a few square yards of beach and watch one another like a gathering of lynxes.

People dawdle along the palm-fringed avenues and stare at one another blankly and questioningly. People sit self-consciously in wheel-chairs and look searchingly at people in other wheel-chairs. Bicyclists wheel languidly along the white roads and gaze intently at every one. “Are you Charley Schwab?” each eye seems to ask mutely. “Are you one of the Stotesburys? Are you anybody?”

OF THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE BICYCLE—OF THE USES OF WHEEL-CHAIRS—AND OF THE MENTAL ACTIVITIES OF CHAIR-CHAUFFEURS

Palm Beachis the heaven of the bicycle. In other parts of the world it has sunk in popular esteem until it is little else than a conveyer of telegraph boys and an instrument for the removal of skin from children’s knees. But in Palm Beach it shares with the wheel-chair the honor of being the chariot of wealth and beauty.

Flocks of bicycles are parked beside every hotel entrance. Broad and flawless sidewalks are reserved for bicycles and wheel-chairs. The pedestrian who sets foot on them does so at his own risk, and is more than apt, if he does so, to have his coat driven several inches into his back by the front wheel of a bicycle.

There is no bicycle costume. Beautiful lady bicyclists wear anything: rakish sport clothes, fragile afternoon gowns, flowing costumes with long capes, and more extreme evening gowns. Large numbers of girls persist in bicycling while wearing tight skirts, so that the general effect is somewhat similar to that of a pony ballet made up as messenger boys.

On side-streets, one frequently sees the almost forgotten spectacle of a frail débutante learning to ride. On the dance floor she would float along as lightly as a tuft of thistledown. On a bicycle she wabbles heavily and helplessly from side to side, collapsing at intervals against her instructor with all the crushing weight of a California Redwood.

The wheel-chair is the favorite Palm Beach method of locomotion, and it is the only form of exercise ever taken by many Palm Beach visitors. Many old inhabitants claim that wheel-chair riding is excellent forthe liver, and devote at least two hours to it every afternoon. The negro chair chauffeurs drive the chair along by vigorous pedaling, and the alternate leg stroke gives the chair a gentle side to side motion which acts as a mild massage on the occupant. Two hours of such exercise is considered to be about enough by the most conservative Palm Beachers. It is their belief that the persons who ride for three hours run a great risk of over-exerting themselves.

The chair-chauffeurs, in addition to possessing tireless legs, are usually supplied with a vast fund of knowledge. This is most desirable; for many visitors speak to no one except the hotel clerks, the news-stand girls, the waiters and their wheel-chair chauffeurs during their entire stay. It frequently happens that their chair chauffeurs are their only guides, philosophers and friends; so the chauffeurs find it very valuable to be fairly familiar with all Palm Beach estates, to have a comprehensive grasp of the flora and

The living-room of the Everglades Club, smart and exclusive retreat of Palm Beach’s smartest habitués.

Bradley’s, the Monte Carlo of America.

The Casino at Palm Beach, where the photographers catch the society favorites reading from left to right.

fauna of the south, and to be conversant with all financial and social matters appertaining to the old-timer. They have also found that a frank exposition of their own philosophical meditations on men and things will sometimes arouse the interest and stimulate the generosity of their charges. “What sort of ducks are those, George?” usually brings the intelligent answer: “Those ain’t no sort, suh. Those is just ducks.” A query as to whether a wheel-chair is harder to push with one or two people in it brought the reply that there “wasn’t no difference.” But to push an empty one is the hardest. Yes, suh! Must be because no money is being made. Yes, suh!

OF THE TELEGRAM-EXPECTERS—OF THE DATE-GUESSERS—AND OF THE STATISTIC-WEEVILS

Thereare many lonely men and women at Palm Beach who almost cry with gratitude when somebody speaks to them. They are like many Congressmen, who are big people at home, but of less account in Washington than a head porter. Out of all the people who flock to Palm Beach to spend large amounts of money and bask in the soothing rays that emanate from the socially prominent, ninety per cent. might be compared to very small potatoes in a two hundred-acre lot. Even the majority of the people whose names are names to conjure with in Palm Beach society can’t be found in the pages ofWho’s Who.

The majority of men who pay the bills at the big hotels are forced to struggle hard to kill time when they have finished their golf-playing for the day. Enormous numbers of them seem to spend most of their spare time sitting dolefully around hotel lobbies and expecting telegrams that never come. If you fall into conversation with any man in any Palm Beach hotel lobby, he invariably explains his inactivity by saying that he is expecting a telegram.

Next to expecting telegrams, the most popular Palm Beach time-killer seems to consist of wondering what day of the week it is. Sneak up behind any two important-looking men who seem to be discussing affairs of moment, and the chances are ten to one that you will hear the following weighty conversation:

“Is to-day Tuesday or Wednesday? I sort of lose track down here.”

“To-day? Why to-day’s Wednesday. No; hold on! It’s Thursday, isn’t it?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s either Tuesday or Wednesday. Still, I don’t know: it might be Thursday.”

“No, I don’t believe it’s Thursday. I was expecting a telegram on Tuesday, and it would have had to come before Thursday. I guess it’s Wednesday.”

“Yes, I guess it is. I thought for a while it was Tuesday.”

“Oh, I don’t believe it’s Tuesday.”

“No, I guess it’s Wednesday, all right. That telegram ought to be here by now. How long are you staying here?”

“I don’t know. I’m expecting a telegram and I can’t tell till it gets here.”

Having reached a comparatively ripe intimacy by this time, it is almost inevitable that one of them should advance one of the thousand statistical questions that are so frequently encountered at Palm Beach, such as “Did you ever stop to think how many nails it took to build this hotel?” A few seconds later both of them have produced envelopes and are figuring busily.

Men who have traveled thousands of miles for the purpose of killing time at PalmBeach will frequently argue for two or three hours, and figure all over the backs of eight or ten envelopes and a couple of golf scores in an attempt to decide whether or not the value of all the diamond bracelets in Palm Beach would be sufficient to secure economic control of Russia. Newcomers to Palm Beach, knowing that America’s greatest financiers flock there during the season, frequently make the mistake of thinking that two men knitting their brows over a lot of figures are probably two great money-kings working up a scheme to corner the nation’s hop crop. In reality they are two ordinary citizens killing a little time by choking it to death with useless statistics.

OF THE CHANGING OF CLOTHES—OF THE WAY THEY WEAR ’EM—AND OF THE FEMALES OF THE DRESS-FERRET SPECIES

Comparedwith the good old days when dresses hooked up the back in such an intricate fashion that one needed blueprints, diagrams and charts in order to hook up a dress properly, there is practically no dress-changing at Palm Beach nowadays. In the old days the womenfolk spent at least forty per cent. of their waking hours changing their clothes. They changed their clothes whenever the wind changed. They changed their clothes every time a train came in. They couldn’t eat or go out in a wheel-chair or put on a string of beads or take a drink without changing their clothes. Their menfolk were kept constantly busy hooking them up the back.

To-day things are different. Dresses no longer hook up the back with their erstwhile whole-heartedness. Careful and competent observers state that many present-day dresses are safely attached to the human frame by as few as three hooks, all of which can be reached without dislocating an arm or displacing any vertebrae, and that an equal number of dresses are merely slid on over the head and worn just as they fall, without any further formality. A great many women at Palm Beach wear only two costumes each day—one for morning and afternoon that shows almost everything below the hips and one for evening that shows almost everything above the waist.

Not so many years ago a woman who wore only two dresses in one day at Palm Beach would have been regarded as mentally unbalanced or disgustingly pauperized.

The real snappy dressers, however, get in and out of three costumes a day; while it is not at all unusual to find prominent societycamp-followers staggering in and out of as many as five and six daily costumes. How they ever do it will ever remain a mystery to us simple writers and oatmeal-manufacturers and mattress-makers from the buckwheat belt.

Every morning directly after breakfast, the hotel lobbies fill up with women who want to talk about dress. The Palm Beach dailies and weeklies cater to their pitiable weakness by specializing on thrilling information of this nature. So far as the female contingent at Palm Beach is concerned, an economic conference in Europe or a presidential utterance on the Bonus hasn’t a chance with such news as what Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney wore at the Beach Club last night.

Outside the warm sun may be beating down upon golden sands and an azure sea, the wind rustling softly through the palms and the bland air thrilling to the melodious murmur of the wheel-chair boys as they point out the Stotesbury cottage with caustic comments on the height of the Stotesbury wall. Yet the dress-ferrets sit on with bated breaths in the cool gloom of the hotel lobbies while the papers inform their enthralled readers that:

“Very smart was the slate colored strictly tailored suit worn by Mrs. Aurelius Vandersouse, Jr., at a recent Poinciana luncheon. Her hat was of a tone of straw perfectly harmonizing with the suit and bore only a flat bow of tomato-wire for trimming. The Honorable Mrs. D. Dryver Flubyer’s suit was fashioned of an imported bed-ticking fabric guiltless of any embellishment. Her chapeau was fashioned of the same fabric. Mrs. J. Eaton Swank wore a clinging gown of fromage-de-brie crêpe in a light heliotrope shade, fashioned in a one-piece style, with flowing sleeves and uneven hem, whose folds clung gracefully to the tall slender wearer.”

That’s the stuff to give the Palm Beach Battalion of Dress. Like Bosco, they eat it alive. They are veritable cormorants for it.

OF THE FASCINATIONS OF THE BEACH—OF THE SAND-HOUNDS FROM ODESSA AND ELSEWHERE—AND OF PRUDES AND STYLISH STOUTS

Athalf past eleven every morning, stimulated by the early morning talk of dress, all the feminine population of Palm Beach, accompanied by all obtainable male escorts, set out from their hotels and homes in wheel-chairs for their daily pilgrimage to the beach.

The beach is not prized by Palm Beach visitors because of its bathing facilities, but because of the perfect spirit of camaraderie and democracy which reigns there. A Philadelphia Biddle is just as apt as not to come along and accidentally rub damp sand on a South Bend Smith. Anything may happen. A Vanderbilt may ask you what time it is.

There is no distinction on the beach itself between the people who emigrated from Montana to Fifth Avenue back in ’01 and the people who emigrated from Odessa to Houston Street back in ’91. Both of them have the same funny knobs on their knees; and there are lots of them—especially of the Odessa set.

The beach is the only place in Palm Beach where everybody has an equal chance; and there everybody uses the same ocean and sits around in the same sand in almost hopeless confusion. Things are so congested that if one leans back carelessly and braces himself by sticking his hand down in the sand, the chances are excellent that a couple of ladies from Kansas City or Boston will come staggering along with their eyes fixed raptly on Mrs. B. Gurney Munn or Mrs. Jerome Bonaparte and sheer off two or three of one’s fingers with their French heels.

The only portion of the beach which anybody considers worth using is the portiondirectly in front of the casino, which is a large, gorgeous, white plaster bath-house with an outdoor swimming pool and polite attendants who are always appearing at inopportune moments and helping patrons to do things which they could do much better alone—such, for example, as removing a towel from a hook or lifting a brush and comb from a shelf.

Many people garbed in elaborate dresses stand on the terrace in front of the casino and stare down at the people on the beach, while the people on the beach stare up at them. On chairs on the beach there are many other elaborately gowned women who examine every one closely and are closely examined by every one.

Down in front of the entire mob stand large numbers of professional photographers who keep a careful lookout for exciting costumes and prominent faces, and constantly snap little groups of laughing people who subsequently appear in leading Sundaypapers or monthly magazines over legends like: “Far from Northern Snows: a happy society group on the Palm Beach sands: from left to right, J. Edge Smush, Mrs. B. Goodwin Eezy, the Honorable Mrs. Claribel Custard, I. Winken Ogle, Miss Patricia Swaddle. Behind the feet at the right, Perry Peevish, Jr.”

Every little while the photographers find some one who is prominent and pretty without being too much overweight and overdressed; and when they do, they coax her out to an unoccupied section of beach and arrange her in a position of unstudied ease and graceful carelessness, and shoot half a dozen pictures of her admiring the distant horizon with a gay, unaffected, girlish laugh.

Everything on the beach is so simple and natural and wholesome that one can’t help but like it. Then, too, one never gets that offensive, salty, seaweedy odor of ocean that one is apt to get on the New Englandcoast, owing to the ocean odors being completely overwhelmed by the rare and powerful French perfumes that are worn by many elements of Palm Beach society. If one closed his eyes, he might think that he was at a perfumery show and that somebody had kicked over all the bottles.

Palm Beach is not exactly what one would call a Prude’s Paradise, but a prude can feel more at ease on the beach at Palm Beach than at any other resort in Florida. This is due to the fact that women are not allowed to appear on the beach with any portion of the leg uncovered. A policeman is stationed on the beach to see that this rule is enforced, and there is a great rejoicing among all the local prudes, who—like all prudes throughout the world—see evil where there is none, and pass blindly by the evils that every one except themselves can see.

This rule has brought about one great benefit in that it has prevented large numbers of ill-advised and otherwise charmingstylish stouts from rolling down their bathing stockings and exposing too much knee. Any rule that does this is a good rule—and it is generally agreed that there are more stylish stouts at Palm Beach than at any other resort on earth.

OF THE THREE DAY SUCKERS—OF TRUE SMARTNESS—AND OF THE BUCKWHEATS AND THE DEAD-LINE

Whenthe bathing hour has passed into history, the merry bathers and clothes-wearers sally forth in search of lunch. The ordinary run of Palm Beach visitors eat their lunch at their hotels. This act almost automatically stamps them as Buckwheats, or Three Day Suckers, or people who aren’t Smart. A Buckwheat is a coarse, rude, barbaric person who is addicted to the secret and loathsome vices of eating buckwheat cakes for breakfast and not spending money recklessly.

A Three Day Sucker is a person who only stays a few days at Palm Beach. As a time-killer he is not regarded with any respect. He travels so far to kill time that he hasn’t any time left to kill when he gets there. This is not regarded as smart. Any one who stays less than two weeks is not viewed with favor by people who stay a month or more, and who know how important smartness is. If one wishes to have the respect of the cigar-counter clerks and the mail clerks and the head waiters and other Palm Beach people who—as the ultra-refined advertisements say—matter, one must above all things be smart. You might as well be dead at Palm Beach as not be smart.

Certain things are smart and certain things are not smart. It is smart, for example, for a man to go without a hat. It is smart to ride a bicycle. Any article of feminine wearing apparel that is essentially useless is smart. It is smart to speak of a thing as smart. It is not at all smart to tell a Palm Beacher that you would gladly disembowel him when you hear him use the word “smart” for the fiftieth time.

None of the big Palm Beach hotels rentsrooms without meals. One must pay for his meals as well. Two people at most of the big hotels pay a minimum rate of about thirty-five dollars a day for the two—which is about the amount from which the same people would have to separate themselves at any of the big New York or Chicago or Boston or Washington hotels by the time they had finished paying for their food. But if one wishes to be smart at Palm Beach, one mustn’t lunch or dine at the hotel where one’s meals are included on his bill. It is very buckwheat to do such a thing: very uncouth: very hick and very rough-neck: not, in a word, smart. That is why the desirable Palm Beach habitués, at the height of the season, find it difficult to spend less than a hundred dollars apiece per day. One can’t indulge in games of chance or keep many wheel-chairs on that amount; but if one is reasonably careful and content to be only moderately smart, one can get along fairly well for a hundred dollars a day.

The truly smart person strives always to pay for two meals where one would normally be paid for. He strives to pay for one that he eats and for one that nobody eats. If one is living at the Poinciana, one should make an effort to lunch or dine at the Breakers or at the Country Club or at the Beach Club or at the Everglades Club, or one of the cottages. It is a fascinating system, and is based on the familiar society theory that the more useless a thing is, the smarter it is.

One of the smartest—in a society sense—of all the persons that come to Palm Beach is a man who never eats at the hotel where he lives, and who keeps a flock of twelve wheel-chairs always in attendance on him. Day and night his twelve wheel-chairs are waiting for him and his friends. They are used about an hour a day—but it is very smart to keep them waiting: frightfully smart. Useless and therefore smart.

The head waiters in the restaurants become very proficient at distinguishing those who are smart from those who are not smart. In the dining-room of the largest hotel there is a cross-strip of green carpet which is known as the dead-line. The people who sit between the entrance and the dead-line have been carefully looked over by the head waiter and put in the smart class. But the people who are put on the kitchen side of the dead-line are dubs and Buckwheats in the judgment of the head waiter. Once people are put below the dead-line, they rarely have a chance to come up for air, but are doomed to stay down among the other Buckwheats for the remainder of their visit.

OF THE SMARTEST THING IN PALM BEACH—OF LARGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY—AND OF THE OLD GUARD

Thesmartest thing at Palm Beach is the Everglades Club. The Everglades Club is so smart that it almost gives itself a pain. It has only a few over four hundred members, but these four hundred include names that make a society editor’s scalp tingle, and control so much money and jewels that the mere mention of them is enough to make any normal burglar tremble all over.

The Everglades Club building was started in the summer of 1918 by Paris Singer, who is a wealthy society man, as a hospital for convalescent officers. The war was over, however, before the building was ever used as a hospital; and it immediately occurred to the smartest of the Palm Beach colony thatthe building was exactly the thing to use for a smart club where really smart people could go off by themselves and be too exclusive for words. The proposition was put up to Paris Singer, who saw the force of it; and that’s how the Everglades Club started. The initiation fee and yearly dues might be expected to be about as large as the national debt, but in reality they amount to something like one hundred dollars initiation fee and fifty dollars yearly dues. The club has built a very smart and attractive apartmenthouse within a stone’s throw of the parent building; and in it club members can rent small but smart apartments for a mere twenty-five hundred dollars a season—and there are several Maine summer resorts where one pays as much and gets much less for his money.

The club has its own golf links and tennis courts; and it has a restaurant whose chef could easily enter a cheffing contest with the leading Parisian chefs with an excellentchance to win the diamond-studded skillet, or the seventeen-jeweled egg-beater. It is my fixed belief that if old M’sieu Marguery, who invented Filet of Sole Marguery, could have been led into the dining-room of the Everglades Club and placed where he could look out through the palms to the placid waters of Lake Worth, and handed a platter of Pompano Meuniere—it is my fixed belief, I say, that old M’sieu Marguery would have put his head down in his hands and cried like a child to think that he could have doubled his fortune if he could have started serving Pompano that way thirty years ago.

The interior fixtures of the Everglades Club are of the proper sort to go with such food. The walls are hung with sixteenth century tapestries, and the dining-room is wainscoted with oak from the interior of a Spanish monastery.

There was some talk at one time of covering the wall of one room with silver platesmade by flattening the silver cocktail shakers of the club members. This was never done, however; and it is probable that the members found other uses for their shakers.

It would be idle to attempt to estimate with any accuracy the amount of money represented by members of the Everglades Club. If they were pushed, they could easily dig up one billion dollars among them.

While we are speaking in billions instead of in mere beggarly millions, it might be appropriate to mention that the most astute Palm Beach estimaters figure that the thirteen hundred guests who fill the Royal Poinciana Hotel at the height of the season, if placed in one room and carefully assayed, would yield at least two billion dollars.

The Country Club is another smart place at which to lunch or dine. There is no restaurant in Europe to my knowledge that is able to produce a better dinner than the Palm Beach Country Club, especially if one leaves it, as the saying goes, to François.François is the head waiter; and he works in conjunction with a chef named Marius, who inherited most of his recipes from a gifted relative in the south of France, and who spends a large part of his time when not cooking in fearing that somebody will solve the recipes. The chief object of the Country Club is to provide a golfing retreat from the Buckwheats and the Three Day Suckers, who usually break for the hotel golf links immediately on arrival. Consequently the links which are open to the Buckwheats are apt to become so congested that if one doesn’t stick rigidly in his place in the golf procession, he is more than apt to get a couple of golf balls in the side of the head and then have to stand aside for two hours while a long parade of golfers and near-golfers hacks its way past him. So the smart golfers go to the Country Club. It is there that one finds the Old Guard of Palm Beach.

The Old Guard is a hide-bound organization of ardent golfers who know all the intimate personal scandal about practically every dollar that has changed hands in North America since the Dutch purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians for twenty-four dollars, and threw in enough rum to provide magnificent hang-overs for the families of the original owners.

One must have been a resident of Palm Beach for five years before he is allowed to join the Old Guard, the theory being that unless a golfer has lived there for five years, he is not thoroughly conversant with the essential features of Palm Beach gossip and will be apt to interrupt a calm and quiet game of golf to ask who the G. Daley Squabbles are going to marry when they have divorced each other, or some other equally irrelevant and unnecessary question.

OF THOSE WHO WISH TO CRASH INTO SOCIETY—AND OF THOSE WHO FURNISH THE PALPITATING SOCIETY ITEMS

Thebusiness of being smart and appearing at the proper places at the proper hour is merely the accepted method of killing time with many Palm Beachers; but with many others it is as serious as the death of a near relative. Palm Beach is well sprinkled with people who are determined to break into New York society, and who have selected Palm Beach as the place to drive the entering wedge because results can be obtained there with greater speed, with less expense and with more noise than in any other section of the country.

A young New Yorker with a small income broke into society with a crash and married, not so very long ago, a beautiful widowwith a strangle-hold on society and a fortune that kept a couple of income tax experts working a month each year. He explained his system to a friend of mine with the peculiar half childish and half idiotic frankness that may frequently be encountered in the upper crust of society. If he had attempted to break in by way of New York, he said, he would have spent all his money on dinners and luncheons; and about as much notice would have been taken of his struggles as would be taken of a stray dish of prunes at a banquet. But by coming to Palm Beach and getting on the right side of the society reporters, he was able to give one fair-sized and comparatively inexpensive luncheon and have the news telegraphed immediately to the New York papers. By doing this a couple of times a season, he was able to repay all the invitations which he accepted in New York; and it was apparent to all New York newspaper readers that he was making a society splash at Palm Beach. Sohe was soon accepted as being socially prominent, whereupon he picked out the richest thing in sight, married it and stopped worrying.

Many people at Palm Beach feel that they must have press agents to keep them in the limelight. There is one enterprising Palm Beach press agent who supplies the newspapers with palpitating items about seven or eight social climbers, and whose earnings from this source are over thirty thousand a year. When one reads of a socially prominent Palm Beacher doing something fearfully original, like giving a dinner to all her friends’ dogs, one may know that she has been hiring a press agent to fill her mind with valuable ideas.

OF THE ALIBI WINDOW—OF THE TRICK FLASKS AND CANES—OF DRINKERS FRAIL AND FAT—AND OF ONE CONCEPTION OF SIMPLICITY

ThePalm Beach crowd is always ready to part with money for anything that looks sufficiently smart and interesting. In order to facilitate the parting, some of the country’s leading costumers and rug merchants and hat makers and jewelers have moved their branch stores into the hotel lobbies, so that the passers-by can separate themselves from their money with a minimum of exertion.

There is one Palm Beach window that is known as the Alibi Window. It is full of gorgeous diamond pendants and diamond bracelets and simple little ten-thousand-dollar rings; and the Palm Beach theory is that the shop’s best customers are men who havebeen raising what is somewhat loosely known as the dickens. As is well known, a man whose conscience is troubling him can frequently keep it quiet by getting his wife a pendant of diamonds set in platinum. At night, when the shop is locked up, all the jewelry is removed from the window and replaced with a large flock of frosted silver cocktail-shakers whose appearance alone is warranted to give even a Prohibition Enforcement Agent a thirst. This spectacle is supposed to make the observer hunt up some whisky and get himself nicely boiled, and possibly to make him fall so low as to speak disrespectfully of the society leaders. On the following day he buys jewelry to square himself with his wife.

Large, curved pocket flasks, two of which would make fine protective armor for the entire upper part of the body if worn on opposite sides, are popular at Palm Beach, as is a new trick cane that unscrews at a joint and reveals a long, slender bottle three-quarters of an inch in diameter and two feet long. The popularity of these canes, which come in half-pint and pint sizes, indicate clearly that some enterprising hat manufacturer will soon get out a two-pint straw hat for Florida wear.

There is a great deal of fire-water in sight at Palm Beach at all hours of the day and night; and the débutante who can’t absorb eight cocktails without raising her voice or falling over the chairs is regarded as being handicapped by some sort of inherited weakness. One of the most frequently pointed-out personages at Palm Beach is a very fat man who can—according to the claims made for him by his admirers—drink thirty-five cocktails at one sitting without blinking. The price of Scotch whisky starts down around forty dollars a case in the summer time and works gradually upward until at the height of the season one is paying from seventy to one hundred dollars a case for it.

The building-boom that has struck Palm Beach in the last five years is claimed by most of the loose claimers and enthusiastic drinkers to be due to Prohibition. A great many cottages have been erected by persons of wealth and social prominence in these five years; and the prevalent architectural idea for a simple little Palm Beach cottage seems to be a Spanish modification of a Union Station, or a Court of Jewels at a successful World’s Fair.

To hear the drinkers tell it, these houses have been built so that the owners could have a place in which to drink without being watched or hurried or made to feel uncomfortable. This may be possible; but if it is, the house builders are the only ones who haven’t felt free to drink when and where they choose.

The truth of the matter unquestionably is that the people who built houses liked the place and the climate, and so built in order to enjoy them more thoroughly than theycould be enjoyed in a hotel room smelling faintly of damp carpets and previous occupants.

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