hangers-on: unmarried men and women, youngish rather than young, who,
with little money, yet manage to dress well and to be seen eating and
drinking and dancing in public places. There is usually to be found in
this group a hectic widow or two--be it grass or sod--and a few pretty
girls who, having been given too much freedom at eighteen, begin to
wonder at twenty-eight, why, though they have always been "good
fellows," none of the dozens of men who take them about have married
them. To this aggregation drift also those restless husbands and wives
whose glances rove hopefully away from their mates, a few well-bred
drunkards, and a few men and women who are trying to forget things they
cannot forget.

Then there is always the young married group--a nice group for the most
part--living in comfortable new houses or apartments, and keeping,
usually, both a small automobile and a baby carriage. They also go to
the Country Club on Saturday nights, leave their motors standing in the
drive, eat a lukewarm supper that tastes like papier-mâché, and dance
themselves to wiltedness.

Another group is entirely masculine, being made up of husbands of
various ages, their mutual bond being the downtown club to which they go
daily, and in which the subjects discussed are politics, golf, and the
evils of prohibition. To this group always belong the black-sheep
husbands who, after taking their wives to the Country Club, disappear
and remain away until they are sent for because it is time to go home,
when they come back shamefaced and scented with Scotch.

Every American city has also what Don Marquis calls its "little group of
serious thinkers"--women, most of them--possessed of an ardent desire to
"keep abreast of the times." These women belong to clubs and literary