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 truly good were there—­the sturdy, respectable, and sometimes dowdy good; also the intellectuals—­for ten expensive days at a time—­for it is a deplorable fact that the unworthy frivolous monopolise all the money in the world!  And there, too, were excursionists from East and West and North and South, tired, leaden-eyed, uncomfortable, eating luncheons on private lawns, trooping to see some trained alligators in a muddy pool, resting by roadsides and dunes in the apathy of repletion, the sucked orange suspended to follow with narrowing eyes the progress of some imported hat or gown.

And the bad were there; not the very, very bad perhaps; but the doubtful; over-jewelled, over-tinted of lip and brow and cheek, with shoes too shapely and waists too small and hair too bright and wavy, and—­but dusty alpaca and false front cannot do absolute justice to a pearl collar and a gown of lace; and tired, toil-dimmed eyes may make mistakes, especially as it is already a tradition that America goes to Palm Beach to cut up shindies, or watch others do it.

So they were all there, the irreproachable, the amusing, the inevitable, the intellectual, the good, and the bad, the onduled, and the scant of hair.