Some of the builders of new homes there had been familiar with Cherry Grove. And their move to a quieter community earned them the title of "closet queens" because of their comparative conservatism and respectability. At first this new seclusion by house owners, who, in many cases, had previously patronized Cherry Grove, seemed snobbish, and somehow anti-social. But you can't live the pace that kills all your life and stay alive very long. There were many advantages to the slower-paced Pines. Friendships took on a less casual basis. Love affairs settled down. Established in their own permanent summer homes, lovers' lives became more integrated, as the sociology books term it. While the Cherry Grovers did not miss the opportunity to rib the Pines people whenever they appeared at The Grove, still there was no offense. The Pines residents knew they had not necessarily retreated or escaped so much as they had simply set up their own plan of behavior. Cherry Grove makes rather heavy demands on its inhabitants if they really want to be involved in the center of things there. There is always the need, sometimes a fiercely competitive need, for the new and successful conquest. There is the one-upmanship in entertaining, which means having the most important visitor or the prettiest boy as the weekend catch. And there is the requirement to be met of being invited to all "important" parties and of giving the splashiest and most select party of the season yourself. And there is always the need, God help us, to be, or at least to act young and at Cherry Grove you can be old in one season when you're seventeen if you have been superseded by a later and newer model. These are some of the reasons for moving outside of the Grove.

But the main point about the Pines is that it is generally hospitable to

individualistic people, even including heterosexuals. One has there the feeling of being in a new small-town settlement without the restrictions of the small-town outlook. It also has the cosmopolitan air of all those summer colonies that appeal to artists, expatriates and wanderers, where, for the most part, its inhabitants can do things as well as talk about them. This leaves out the socialite or plain fashion-monger on the one hand and the provincial kind of native on the other. The first group head for richer, "classier" places. (The second probably go south for the winter while the artists, expatriates and wanderers have to fiddle in some way for their meals in some snow and work-bound city.)

But that is the general temper of the Pines. And so it was something of a rude shock when a billboard appeared early one morning at the boat landing in the most prominent spot where new visitors as well as the old inhabitants could not fail to see it. It stated, in scandal-sized letters, "We believe this is a family community. We believe that bikinis tend to disrupt the morals of our children. We believe that raucous parties corrupt the standards of our community. We believe" and so on. The sign was anonymous as all such dictates usually are, and no one took the responsibility for it. It discouraged all kinds of individualism, particularly the growing contingent of ex-Cherry Grovers who had, obviously, but not ostentatiously, been building up the community in a substantial way with a good number of architecturally exciting houses. But the purpose and intention of the sign back-fired because mothers who had marriageable daughters wanted to keep them in bikinis, ex-European refugees who had made a come-back in this country became outraged to see the germ of Nazi Germany sprouting in the land

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