sandwiches, she decided, after looking about and seeing a few other
ladies with glasses before them on other little marble tables, to
accept. It was a lark in some town of the provinces--Meaux or Melun;
what difference did it make?

They formed a little group altogether to Johnny's liking. His wife was
dressed dashingly; his wife's guest made a very fair second; he
himself, although he never lifted a racquet, was in the tennis garb of
that day.

"You both look ripping," he declared with hearty satisfaction. To look
thus, before competing items in the throng, was the object of the place,
the reason for its developing _mise en scene_.

Johnny himself looked ripping--cool, confident, content, and at the top
of his days.

"It was amusing...." said Gertrude to me, with an upward inflection, a
week later.

And she asked me for more about Johnny McComas.

II

If those were days when people began to combine for the pursuit of
pleasure, they were also days when people began to gather at the call of
public duty. If clubs were forming on the borders, other clubs, leagues,
societies were forming nearer the centre--organizations to make
effective the scattered good-will of the well-disposed and to gain some
betterment in the local political life. To initiate and conduct such
movements only a few were needed; but the many were expected to
contribute, if not their zeal and their time, at least their dollars. It
was patriotic righteousness made easy: a man had only to give his fifty
dollars or his five hundred to feel, without further personal exertion,
that he was a good citizen and was forwarding, as all good citizens
should, a worthy cause. This way of doing it fell in wonderfully well
with Raymond's temperament and abilities (or lack of them): the
liberality of his contributions did not remain unknown, and he was
sometimes held up as a favorable specimen of the American citizen.

Another movement was soon to engage his attention. If the prosperous
were to have their playgrounds beyond the city's outskirts, the less
prosperous should have theirs within the city's limits. The scheme of a
system of small parks and playgrounds quite took Raymond's fancy. It
contained, besides the idea of social amelioration, the even more
grateful idea of municipal beautification. In time, indeed, might not
this same notion, fortified by experience and given a wider
application, end by redeeming the town not merely in spots but in its
en