A CHANGE OF BASE February, the gayest winter month on the East Coast, found the winter resorts already overcrowded.

Relays and consignments of fashion arrived and departed on every train; the permanent winter colony, composed of those who owned or rented villas and those who remained for the three months at either of the great hotels, had started the season vigorously.
Dances, dinners, lawn fetes, entertainments for local churches and charities left little time for anything except the routine of the bathing-hour, the noon gathering at "The Breakers," and tea during the concert.
Every day beach, pier, and swimming-pool were thronged; every day the white motor-cars rushed southward to Miami, and the swift power-boats sped northward to the Inlet; and the house-boat rendezvous rang with the gay laughter of pretty women, and the restaurant of the Beach Club flashed with their jewels.
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.
And, belonging to one or more of these divisions, Portlaw, Wayward, and Malcourt were there--had been there, now, for several weeks, the latter as a guest at the Cardross villa.

For the demon of caprice had seized on Wayward, and half-way to Miami he had turned back for no reason under the sun apparently--though Constance Palliser had been very glad to see him after so many years.
The month had made a new man of Hamil.