"These people are going to Chautauqua," said the Professor. "It's a sort of open-air college—they call it—but you'll understand things better when you arrive." A grim twinkle in the back of his eye awakened all my fears.
"Can you get anything to drink there?"
"No."
"Are you allowed to smoke?"
"Ye-es, in certain places."
"Are we staying there over Sunday?"
"No." This very emphatically.
Feminine shrieks of welcome: "There's Sadie!" "Why, Maimie, is that yeou!" "Alf's in the smoker. Did you bring the baby?" and a profligate expenditure of kisses between bonnet and bonnet told me we had struck a gathering place of the clans. It was midnight. They swept us, this horde of clamouring women, into a Black Maria omnibus and a sumptuous hotel close to the borders of a lake—Lake Chautauqua. Morning showed as pleasant a place of summer pleasuring as ever I wish to see. Smooth-cut lawns of velvet grass, studded with tennis-courts, surrounded the hotel and ran down to the blue waters, which were dotted with rowboats. Young men in wonderful blazers, and maidens in more wonderful tennis costumes; women attired with all the extravagance of unthinking Chicago or the grace of Washington (which is Simla) filled the grounds, and the neat French nurses and exquisitely dressed little children ran about together. There was pickerel-fishing for such as enjoyed it; a bowling-alley, unlimited bathing and a toboggan, besides many other amusements, all winding up with a dance or a concert at night. Women dominated the sham mediæval hotel, rampaged about the passages, flirted in the corridors and chased unruly children off the tennis-courts. This place was called Lakewood. It is a pleasant place for the unregenerate.
"We go up the lake in a steamer to Chautauqua," said the Professor.