rmanent winter colony, composed of
those who owned or rented villas and those who remained for the three
months at either of the great hotels, had started the season vigorously.
Dances, dinners, lawn fetes, entertainments for local churches and
charities left little time for anything except the routine of the
bathing-hour, the noon gathering at "The Breakers," and tea during the
concert.

Every day beach, pier, and swimming-pool were thronged; every day the
white motor-cars rushed southward to Miami, and the swift power-boats
sped northward to the Inlet; and the house-boat rendezvous rang with the
gay laughter of pretty women, and the restaurant of the Beach Club
flashed with their jewels.

Dozens of villas had begun their series of house-parties; attractive
girls held court everywhere--under coco-palm and hibiscus, along the
beach, on the snowy decks of yachts; agreeable girls fished from the
pier, pervaded bazaars for charity, sauntered, bare of elbow and throat,
across the sandy links; adorable girls appeared everywhere, on veranda,
in canoes, in wheel-chairs, in the surf and out of it--everywhere youth
and beauty decorated the sun-drenched landscape. And Hamil thought that
he had never before beheld so many ornamental women together in any one
place except in his native city; certainly, nowhere had he ever
encountered such a heterogeneous mixture of all the shades, nuances,
tints, hues, and grades which enter into the warp and weft of the
American social fabric; and he noticed some colours that do not enter
into that fabric at all.

East, West, North, and South sent types of those worthy citizens who
upheld local social structures; the brilliant migrants were there
also--samples of the gay, wealthy, over-accented floating population of
great cities--the rich and homeless and restless--those who lived and
had their social being in the gorgeous and expensive hotels; who had
neither firesides nor taxes nor fixed social obligations to worry them,
nor any of the trying civic or routine duties devolving upon permanent
inhabitants--the jewelled throngers of the horse-shows and motor-shows,
and theatres, and night restaurants--the people, in fact, who make
ocean-liners, high prices, and the metropolis possible, and the name of
their country blinked at abroad. For it is not your native New Yorker
who supports the continual fete from the Bronx to the sea and carries it
over-seas for a Parisian summer.

Then, too, the tru