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The experiment was not entirely a success. To begin with, a waiter person–Mr. Murrill referred to him as a waiter person–sat them down near the front at a small, round table whose enamel top was decorated with two slopped glasses and a bottle one-third filled with wine gone stale. At least the stuff looked and smelled like wine–like a poor quality of champagne.

“Ugh!” said Mr. Murrill, tasting the air. “Somebody evidently couldn’t wait until lunch time before he started his tippling. And I didn’t suspect either that this place might be a bootlegging place in disguise. Well, since prohibition came in it’s hard to find a resort shop anywhere where you can’t buy bad liquor–if only you go about it the right way.”

When the waiter person brought their order he bade him remove the bottle and the slopped glasses, and the waiter person obliged, but so sulkily and with such slowness of movement that Mr. Murrill was moved to speak to him rather sharply. Even so, the sullen functionary took his time about the thing. Nor did the orangeade prove particularly appetizing. Mr. Murrill barely tasted his.

“Shall we clear out?” he asked, making a fastidious little grimace.

At the door, on the way out, he made excuses.

“Sorry I suggested coming into this place,” he said, sinking his voice. “Either it is a shop which has gone off badly or its merits have been overadvertised by its loving friends. To me the whole atmosphere of the establishment seemed rather dubious, eh, what? Well, what shall we do next? I see a few bathers down below. Shall we go down on the beach and find a place to sit and watch them for a bit?”

They went; and he found a bench in a quiet place under the shorings of the boardwalk close up alongside one of the lesser bathing pavilions, and they sat there, and he talked and she listened. The man had an endless fund of gossip about amusing and noted people; most of them, it would seem, were his intimates. Telling one or two incidents in which these distinguished friends had figured, he felt it expedient to sink his voice to a discreet undertone. There was plainly apparent a delicacy of feeling in this; one did not shout out the names of such persons for any curious passer-by to hear. It developed that there was one specially close bond between him and the members of General Dunlap’s family, an attachment partly based upon old acquaintance and partly upon the fact that the Dunlaps thought he once upon a time had saved the life of the general’s youngest daughter, Millicent.

“Really, though, it was nothing,” he said deprecatingly, as befitted a modest and a mannerly man. “The thing came about like this: It was once when we were all out West together. We were spending a week at the Grand Canyon. One morning we took the Rim Drive over to Mohave Point. No doubt you know the spot? I was standing with Millicent on the outer edge of the cliff and we were looking down together into that tremendous void when all of a sudden she fainted dead away. Her heart isn’t very strong–she isn’t athletic as Claire, her older sister, and the other Dunlap girls are–and I suppose the altitude got her. Luckily I was as close to her as I am to you now, and I saw her totter and I threw out my arms–pardon me–like this.” He illustrated with movements of his arms. “And luckily I managed to catch her about the waist as she fell forward. I held on and dragged her back out of danger. Otherwise she would have dropped for no telling how many hundreds of feet. Of course it was only a chance that I happened to be touching elbows with the child, and naturally I only did what anyone would have done in the same circumstances, but the whole family were tremendously grateful and made a great pother over it. By the way, speaking of rescues, have you heard about the thing that happened to the two Van Norden girls at Bailey’s Beach last week? I must tell you about that.”