NELSON'S father had failed to comprehend the interest of the group of young people in what he thought of as the girlish chatter from the sofa. It seemed to him that just as she looked like any other "summer flapper," so also did she chatter like any other little creature of her kind; and in this he had no perception of how "original" and special an individual his children and their friends were finding her. This was to be her first season here; but she had spent summers at other resorts, and was giving them a lively account of the important people of these places. She had intimately known several celebrities of the first water—one of them, indeed, was a captain at Nelson's university—and so, to these listeners, she spoke of grandees of their own world. If Mr. Smock and some of his contemporaries had occupied the living room and young Nelson had come in to find them listening to an elderly stranger gossiping briskly of important financiers, the boy would have thought the session as dismal as it was inexplicable, and per-
