The catastrophe occurred while the Ducal party was investigating the strange folk-customs of those Americans who gathered during the winter in gigantic Florida hotels and lived there, uncomfortably lodged, vilely fed, and shamelessly robbed, while third-rate orchestras play cabaret music and enervating breezes stir the cabbage-palmettos till they rustle like bath-room rubber plants.
It was a bad place and a bad time of year for a young and British girl to be deprived of her native and soporific fiction; for the livelier and Frenchier of British novelists were self-denied her, because somebody had said they were not unlike Americans.
Now she was, in the uncouth vernacular of the[68] country, up against it for fair! She didn't know what it was called, but she realised how it felt to be against something.
Three days she endured it, dozing in her room, half awake when the sea-breeze rattled the Venetian blinds, or the niggers were noisy at baseball.
On the fourth day she arose, went to the window, gazed disgustedly out over the tawdry villas of Verbena Inlet, then rang for her maid.
"Bunn," she said, "here are three sovereigns. You will please buy for me one specimen of every book on sale in the corridor of this hotel. And, Bunn!——"
"Yes, my lady."
"What was it you were eating the other day?"
"Chewing-gum, my lady."
"Is it—agreeable?"