The traveler perspires lightly and marvels at the thought that it was only night before last when he slipped on a piece of ice and got half a peck of snow down the back of his neck. He remembers that it is a great and glorious country—a fact which his contemplation of the antics of Congress had caused him to forget.
Occasionally the train flashes past little towns sitting hotly in the sun and sand among a few orange and grapefruit trees. This is Florida, and the land looks as though it were worth about a nickel an acre—just as it has always looked until some one develops it and begins to sell off corner lots at a paltry five thousand dollars apiece.
Around breakfast time—a mere thirty-six hours since the train emerged from its northern blizzard and snow-drifts—the train crosses a shimmering strip of blue water and comes to rest beside a hotel that seems, at first glance, to be at least ten miles long. It stretches off so far into the distance that people up at the other end appear to be hull-down. In reality it is only about half a mile long, and only about five hundred times larger than the Mousam House at Kennebunk, Maine.
On the station platform are women in satin skirts, gauzy waists and diamond bracelets. Young men in white trousers dash up and down the platform on bicycles. The air is soft and balmy. Palm trees stretch off into the distance in every direction. Wheel-chairs, propelled by dignified-looking negroes who sit on bicycle-seats directly behind the chairs and pedal vigorously, move hither and yon in a stately manner. Through the palm trees one catches glimpses of white yachts riding at anchor on blue water.
A wheel-chair stops at the edge of the station platform. In it are seated a dignified gentleman in white flannels, and a gracious lady in a satin skirt and a sweater covered with neat lightning effects in red, green and orange zigzags. One wonders whether this can be J. Pierpont Morgan or Charley Schwab. Then one hears the gracious lady whisper excitedly to the dignified gentleman: “Do you suppose that’s Charley Schwab or J. Pierpont Morgan over there?” and hears the dignified gentleman reply in a hoarse undertone: “Shut up, or they’ll think we’re boobs!”
This is Palm Beach, the very center of the winter time-killing industry.
CHAPTER III
OF THE PECULIAR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TWO SIDES OF A LAKE—OF MONEY ODORS—AND OF THE QUESTERS AFTER CHARLEY SCHWAB
Palm Beach is a long narrow strip of land which is separated from the mainland by a long narrow body of water known as Lake Worth, and by a sudden increase in living expenses. On the mainland side of Lake Worth is the rising young city of West Palm Beach, where one is not afraid—as he usually is in Palm Beach—to offer a storekeeper or a newsboy a nickel lest he should regard it as some strange, unknown foreign coin. West Palm Beach is full of ordinary people who are unacquainted with wheel-chairs and think nothing of walking two or three blocks, or even as much as half a mile if the necessity arises. They frequently get along for days at a time without spending more than two dollars and eighty-five cents a day.
West Palm Beach has the same sort of climate that Palm Beach has, but the air of the place is somehow different. At Palm Beach one has the feeling that he is breathing the very same air that the world’s greatest bankers and society people are breathing, whereas over in West Palm Beach one doesn’t know or care who has been breathing the air. That is why so many people find the Palm Beach climate very invigorating, but always feel that the climate of West Palm Beach leaves them a little weak and tired.