House, and they jostled quaint groups of almond-eyed legations
in the yellows and purples of the East, who looked dreamily on as if
puzzled past all surmise by the scene. Certain young gentlemen with
the unmistakable air of being European or South American attaches found
their way about on their little feet, which the stalwart boots of
the republican masses must have imperilled; and smiled with a faint
diplomatic superiority, not visibly admitted, but all the same
indisputable. Several of these seemed to know Miss Anderson, and took
her presentation of Mavering with exaggerated effusion.

"I want to introduce you to my cousin over yonder," she said, getting
rid of a minute Brazilian under-secretary, and putting her hand on Dan's
arm to direct him: "Mrs. Justice Averill."

Miss Van Hook, keeping her look of severe vigilance, really followed her
energetic niece, who took the lead, as a young lady must whenever she
and her chaperon meet on equal terms.

Mrs. Justice Averill, who was from the far West somewhere, received Dan
with the ease of the far East, and was talking London and Paris to him
before the end of the third minute. It gave Dan a sense of liberation,
of expansion; he filled his lungs with the cosmopolitan air in a sort
of intoxication; without formulating it, he felt, with the astonishment
which must always attend the Bostonian's perception of the fact, that
there is a great social life in America outside of Boston. At Campobello
he had thought Miss Anderson a very jolly girl, bright, and up to all
sorts of things; but in the presence of the portable Boston there he
could not help regarding her with a sort of tolerance which he now
blushed for; he thought he had been a great ass. She seemed to know all
sorts of nice people, and she strove with generous hospitality to make
him have a good time. She said it was Cabinet Day, and that all the
secretaries' wives were receiving, and she told him he had better make
the rounds with them. He assented very willingly, and at six o'clock he
was already so much in the spirit of this free and simple society,
so much opener and therefore so much wiser than any other, that he
professed a profound disappointment with the two or three Cabinet ladies
whose failure to receive brought his pleasure to a premature close.

"But I suppose you're going to Mrs. Whittington's to-night!" Miss
Anderson said to him, as they drove up to Wormley's, where she set him
down. Miss Van Hook ha