A very merry, dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing and unthinking time.
—Dryden.
Like all places in which idlers try to avoid finding out that they are idle, Palm Beach has very definite customs as to where to go, and at what time to go there. Excepting in its hours for going to bed and getting up, it runs on schedule. The official day begins with the bathing hour—half past eleven to half past twelve—when the two or three thousand people from the pair of vast hotels assemble before the casino on the beach. Golfers will, of course, be upon the links before this hour; fishermen will be casting from the pier or will be out in boats searching the sail fish—that being the "fashionable" fish at the present time; ladies of excessive circumference will be panting rapidly along the walks, their eyes holding that look of dreamy determination which painters put into the eyes of martyrs, and which a fixed intention to lose twenty pounds puts into the eyes of banting women. So, too, certain gentlemen of swarthy skin make their way to the casino sun parlor, where they disrobe and bake until the bathing hour. The object of this practice is to acquire, as nearly as a white man may, the complexion of a mulatto, and it is surprising to see how closely the skins of some more ardent members of the "Browning Club," as this group is called, match those of their chair boys. The underlying theory of the "Browning Club" is that a triple-plated coat of tan, taken north in March, advertises the wearer as having been at Palm Beach during the entire winter, thus establishing him as a man not merely of means, but of great endurance.
The women of Palm Beach seem to be divided into two distinct schools of thought on the subject of tanning. While none of them compete with the radicals of the "Browning Club," one may nevertheless observe that, in evening dress, many young ladies reveal upon their necks, shoulders, and arms, stenciled outlines of the upper margins of their bathing suits. Ladies of the opposing school, upon the contrary, guard the whiteness of their skins as jealously as the men of the "Browning Club" guard their blackness. Rather than be touched with tan, many ladies of the latter group deny themselves the pleasures of the surf. The parasols beneath which they arrive upon the sands are not lowered until they are safely seated beneath the green and blue striped canvas tops of their beach chairs, and it may be observed that even then they are additionally fortified against the light, by wide black hats and thick dark veils draped to mask their faces up to the eyes; "harem" veils, they call them—the name, however, signifying nothing polygamous.
A pleasant diversion at the beginning of the bathing hour occurs when some mere one-horse millionaire from a Middle-Western town appears on the beach with his family. He is newly arrived and is under the fond delusion that he is as good as anybody else and that his money is as good as any other person's money. Seeing the inviting rows of beach chairs, he and his family plump into several of them. They are hardly settled, however, when the man who attends to the beach chairs comes and asks them to get out, saying that the chairs are reserved.
The other thinks the man is lying like a head waiter, and demands to know for whom the chairs are reserved.
In reply the beach-chair man mentions, with suitable deference, the name of Mrs. Hopkinson Skipkinson Jumpkinson-Jones.
"Well," cries the Middle-Westerner, "Mrs. Jones isn't here yet, is she? She can't use the chairs now, can she, if she isn't here?"
Even without this evidence that he does not grasp at all, the seriousness of the beach-chair situation, the fact that the uncouth stranger has referred to Mrs. H. S. Jumpkinson-Jones merely as "Mrs. Jones," brands him among the Palm Beach "regulars" who have overheard him, as a barbarian of the barbarians. People in neighboring chairs at once turn their backs upon him and glance at each other knowingly with raised eyebrows. At this juncture, let us hope, the daughter of the intruder manages to pry him loose; let us hope also that she takes him aside and tells him what everybody ought to know: namely, that Mrs. H. S. Jumpkinson-Jones has been a society leader ever since the "Journal" published the full-page Sunday story about her having gold fillings put in her Boston terrier's teeth. That was away back in 1913, just before she was allowed to get her divorce from Royal Tewksbury Johnson III of Paris, Newport, and New York. The day after the divorce she married her present husband, and up to last year, when the respective wives of a munitions millionaire and a moving-picture millionaire began to cut in on her, no one thought of denying her claim to be the most wasteful woman in Palm Beach.
True, she may not come down to the beach to-day, but in that case it is obviously proper that her chairs—including those of her dog and her husband—remain magnificently vacant throughout the bathing hour.