rabble
at its heels; friendships are accidents of the day, diplomacy is
carried on by dining; every party has a political purpose, every
civility a double meaning. Nevertheless, the sparkle of wit, the
kindling of enthusiasm, are not absent from it; on the contrary, there
is more of that than elsewhere, for it is sustained by the chosen
intellect and beauty of the continent. You may meet admirals there who
have sailed round the world, generals who have fought mighty battles,
priests who may yet be popes, men and women who are figures of
the century: they will tell you the romance of their travel, the
heart-beat of their successes, and you will contrive to hear it for
all the accompanying roar and sweep in which they are the lay figures
for aspirants to measure, and the property of reporters. In such a
Society of course all asperities are softened: this man's daughter
dances with the son of his arch-enemy; deference is accorded to the
opinion of a woman on public matters as if she already possessed her
right of suffrage; there is an exhilaration in meeting and avoiding
and overlooking, in the light and skillful skating over dangerous
surfaces, while a rare freedom unites with a gentle even if politic
courtesy, which it is delightful to meet to-night and which allures
you to seek it to-morrow. Society without a conscience it is,
possibly, but for all that sufficiently fascinating.

Let us look at one of its scenes: not a "state sociable" nor a hotel
"hop," and not a President's "levee." There are fine ladies who have
lived forty years in Washington without attending that pandemonium,
the levee, where the crowd seizes one with a hundred hands till
flounce and furbelow are crushed in its grasp, and where, while the
court reigns in the Blue Room, the mob are disporting themselves in
the magnificence of the East Room, the parlor of the people, where
they have the reddest of red curtains, the broadest of gold cornices,
the portraits of their public servants in the panels between square
rods of looking-glass; where the huge chandeliers shine with a
thousand pendants and a thousand jets, and where, because foreign
crowds tread bare marble floors, they have on theirs a tufted velvet,
and so revolve rejoicing on the biggest carpet in the world, like the
medley of a vast kaleidoscope--old people with one foot in the grave,
children in arms, a bride with veil and orange-blossoms, cripples,
heroes, dwarfs and beauties, all together