Behind and below the Boardwalk, between the Inlet and Iowa Avenue, Atlantic City proper, a dignified town of a prevailing gray tone, rambled back to the Thoroughfares and the salt marshes, and on the south merged into the faubourg of Chelsea. It was a town with a life of its own and regarded its façade as almost if not wholly negligible. Its social life, like that of other small towns, revolved about its churches, Episcopalianism representing the flake of the crust, and its women’s clubs were often storm-centers of politics. The men had their professional and business clubs, and some sixty leading citizens met for a weekly luncheon at one of the city hotels either to talk business or forget it, and to sing, with the abandon of boys, the sentimental songs of their youth. Atlantic Avenue, a broad if unpicturesque thoroughfare, had its enormous trolleys that went from the Inlet to Longport, at the southern tip of the island; but Pacific Avenue, with its fine Public Library, its churches and reserved private houses, relied on the humble jitney. It was not a bustling city but it had a constant surge of life, and there was no apparent poverty except in the negro quarter, whose denizens found compensation in a conscious political power. And it was a proud city, for all its streets were avenues, its shops were serenely independent of the extortionists on the Boardwalk, the best of its private houses looked like dignified old folks, well preserved but with no pretensions to youth, and its air was tonic. Visitors in the great frontal hotels, looking down on the quiet little gray city, assumed that oyster-dredging was still its main industry, and the humbler patrons of the hundreds of hotels and boarding-houses of the town accepted it as an annex to the Boardwalk and knew as little of its life as of its history. Gita had often wandered about the town, which attracted her more than Chelsea or Ventnor, for although far from contemporary with the manor it represented the vision and enterprise of that group of men, including her great-grandfather, who had founded it in the early fifties, and now it had an elderly dignity and beauty of its own.