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The remaining weeks of their holiday accomplished even more towards Louise's worldly initiation, for she found herself dining and dancing and matching opinions in private palaces among an anomalous assortment of men and women. Before proceeding to Florida they paused in Washington, where friends of Miriam and Walter Windrom whirled them into the routine of that unique conglomeration of the provincial and the sophisticated. Left alone among them, Louise might for a while have been awed by pompous ladies whose husbands were senators from western states, and unimpressed by young men whose shoulders bore no trace of the burdens laid upon them by foreign governments. But Miriam's polite negativity towards the conspicuously grand, and her full and ready response to some of the unassuming furnished Louise with useful cues, and when Walter was of the party she was even more secure, for he had a faculty of accepting everything at its face value, while privately adding to or subtracting from the offering, with a twinkle in his eye, or a twinkle in his speech.

Walter's good-natured technique, Louise reflected, was more nearly akin to her own temperament than were Miriam's precisely graduated coolness and cordialities. Certain importunate people Miriam simply ignored, as though declining to give them a seat in her coach. Walter, while he was equally exclusive,