elected to be pleased with unconventionality,
finding a great zest in freedom, and making a joke of every
inconvenience. Society will make its own rules, and although there are
several other large hotels, and good houses as watering-place hotels go,
and cottage-life here as elsewhere is drawing away its skirts from hotel
life, society understood why a person might elect to stay at Rodick's.
Bar Harbor has one of the most dainty and refined little hotels in the
world-the Malvern. Any one can stay there who is worth two millions of
dollars, or can produce a certificate from the Recorder of New York that
he is a direct descendant of Hendrick Hudson or Diedrich Knickerbocker.
It is needless to say that it was built by a Philadelphian--that is to
say one born with a genius for hotel-keeping. But though a guest at the
Malvern might not eat with a friend at Rodick's, he will meet him as a
man of the world on friendly terms.
Bar Harbor was indeed an interesting society study. Except in some of
the cottages, it might be said that society was on a lark. With all the
manners of the world and the freemasonry of fashionable life, it had
elected to be unconventional. The young ladies liked to appear in
nautical and lawn-tennis toilet, carried so far that one might refer to
the "cut of their jib," and their minds were not much given to any
elaborate dressing for evening. As to the young gentlemen, if there were
any dress-coats on the island, they took pains not to display them, but
delighted in appearing in the evening promenade, and even in the
ballroom, in the nondescript suits that made them so conspicuous in the
morning, the favorite being a dress of stripes, with striped jockey cap
to match, that did not suggest the penitentiary uniform, because in
state-prisons the stripes run round. This neglige costume was adhered to
even in the ballroom. To be sure, the ballroom was little frequented,
only an adventurous couple now and then gliding over the floor, and
affording scant amusement to the throng gathered on the piazza and about
the open windows. Mrs. Montrose, a stately dame of the old school, whose
standard was the court in the days of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster,
disapproved of this laxity, and when a couple of young fellows in striped
array one evening whirled round the room together, with brier-wood pipes
in their mouths, she was scandalized. If the young ladies shared her
sentiments they made no resolute protests, remembering
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