ace of
cousinship"--to hold posts near the government; and, with full
allowance for favoritism, some of these were men of culture, travel and
attainment--most of them were gentlemen. And the nucleus, as well as
the amalgam of all these elements, was the resident families of old
Washingtonians. These had lived there so long as to be able to winnow
the chaff and throw the refuse off.

There has ever been much talk about the corruption of Washington, easy
hints about Sodom, with a general sweep at the depravity of its social
system. But it is plain these facile fault-finders knew no more of its
inner circle--and for its resident society only is any city
responsible--than they did of the court of the Grand Turk. Such critics
had come to Washington, had made their "dicker," danced at the hotel
hops, and been jostled on the Avenue. If they essayed an entrance into
the charmed circle, they failed.

Year after year, even the Titans of the lobby assailed the gates of
that heaven refused them; and year after year they fell back, baffled
and grommelling, into the pit of that outer circle whence they came.
Yet every year, especially in the autumn and spring, behind that
Chinese wall was a round of entertainments less costly than the crushes
of the critic circle, but stamped with quiet elegance aped in vain by
the non-elect. And when the whirl whirled out at last, with the departing
Congress; when the howling crowd had danced its mad _carmagnole_ and
its vulgar echoes had died into distance, then Washington society was
itself again. Then the sociality of intercourse--that peculiar charm
which made it so unique--became once more free and unrestrained.

Passing from the reek of a hotel ball, or the stewing soiree of a
Cabinet secretary into the quiet _salon_ of a West End home, the
very atmosphere was different, and comparison came of itself with that
old _Quartier Saint Germain_, which kept undefiled from the pitch
that smirched its Paris, through all the hideous dramas of the
_bonnet rouge_.

The influence of political place in this country has long spawned a
social degradation. Where the gift is in the hands of a fixed power,
its seeking is lowering enough; but when it is besought from the
enlightened voter himself, "the scurvy politician" becomes a reality
painfully frequent. Soliciting the ballot over a glass of green corn
juice in the back room of a country grocery, or flattering the _cara
sposa_ of the farmhouse, with squa