treet.

He had never been in Washington before, and he had a confused sense
of having got back to Rome, which he remembered from his boyish visit.
Throughout his stay he seemed to be coming up against the facade of
the Temple of Neptune; but it was the Patent Office, or the Treasury
Building, or the White House, and under the gay Southern sky this
reversion to the sensations of a happier time began at once, and made
itself a lasting relief. He felt a lift in his spirits from the first.
They gave him a room at Wormley's, where the chairs comported themselves
as self-respectfully upon two or three legs as they would have done at
Boston upon four; the cooking was excellent, and a mercenary welcome
glittered from all the kind black faces around him. After the quiet of
Ponkwasset and the rush of New York, the lazy ease of the hotel pleased
him; the clack of boots over its pavements, the clouds of tobacco smoke,
the Southern and Western accents, the spectacle of people unexpectedly
encountering and recognising each other in the office and the
dining-room, all helped to restore him to a hopefuller mood. Without
asking his heart too curiously why, he found it lighter; he felt that he
was still young.

In the weather he had struck a cold wave, and the wind was bitter in
the streets, but they were full of sun; he found the grass green in
sheltered places, and in one of the Circles he plucked a blossomed spray
from an adventurous forceythia. This happened when he was walking from
Wormley's to the Arlington by a roundabout way of his own involuntary
invention, and he had the flowers in his button-hole when Lafflin was
pointed out to him in the reading room there, and he introduced himself.
Lafflin had put his hat far back on his head, and was intensely chewing
a toothpick, with an air of rapture from everything about him. He seemed
a very simple soul to Dan's inexperience of men, and the young fellow
had no difficulty in committing him to a fair conditional arrangement.
He was going to stay some days in Washington, and he promised other
interviews, so that Dan thought it best to stay too. He used a sheet of
the Arlington letter-paper in writing his father of what he had done;
and then, as Lafflin had left him, he posted his letter at the clerk's
desk, and wandered out through a corridor different from that which he
had come in by. It led by the door of the ladies parlour, and at the
sound of women's voices Dan halted. For no other