[Illustration: THE THOROUGHFARE.]

The patient probably hears the word as Acapulco. For she answers, "No,
but I tried St. Augustine last winter. Not a morsel of good."

Among these you encounter sometimes lovely, frail, transparent girls,
who come down with cheeks of wax, and go home in two months with
cheeks of apple. Or stout gentlemen arriving yellow, and going back in
due time purple.

Once a hardened siren of many watering-places, large and blooming,
arrived at Atlantic City with her latest capture, a stooping invalid
gentleman of good family in Rhode Island. They boated, they had
croquet on the beach, they paced the shining sands. Both of them
people of the world and past their first youth, they found an
amusement in each other's knowing ways and conversation that kept them
mutually faithful in a kind of mock-courtship. The gentleman, however,
was evidently only amusing himself with this travesty of sentiment,
though he was never led away by the charms of younger women. After a
month of it he succeeded in persuading her for the first time to
enter the water, and there he assisted her to take the billows in the
gallant American fashion. Her intention of staying only in the very
edge of the ocean he overruled by main force, playfully drawing her
out where a breaker washed partially over her. As the water touched
her face she screamed, and raised her arm to hide the cheek that had
been wet. She then ran hastily to shore, and her friend, fearing some
accident, made haste to rejoin her. His astonishment was great at
finding one of her cheeks of a ghastly, unhealthy white. Her color had
always been very high. That afternoon she sought him and explained.
She was really an invalid, she said calmly, and had recently undergone