Page:The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina's Reasons, The Path of Duty, Four Meetings (Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1885).djvu/119

Rh house was not the pleasantest there, it was at least difficult to say which was pleasanter; and the complaint sometimes made of it that it was too limited, that it left out, on the whole, more people than it took in, applied with much less force when it was thrown open for a general party. Toward the end of the social year, in those soft, scented days of the Washington spring, when the air began to show a southern glow, and the little squares and circles (to which the wide, empty avenues converged according to a plan so ingenious, yet so bewildering) to flush with pink blossom and to make one wish to sit on benches,—at this period of expansion and condonation Mrs. Bonnycastle, who, during the winter, had been a good deal on the defensive, relaxed her vigilance a little, became humorously inconsistent, vernally reckless, as it were, and ceased to calculate the consequences of an hospitality which a reference to the back files—or even to the morning's issue—of the newspapers might easily show to be a mistake. But Washington life, to Vogelstein's apprehension, was paved with mistakes; he felt himself to be in a society which was founded on necessary errors. Little addicted as he was to the sportive view of existence, he had said to himself, at an early stage of his sojourn, that the only way to enjoy the United States would be to burn one's standards and warm one's self at the blaze. Such were the reflections of a theoretic Teuton, who now walked, for the most part, amid the ashes of his prejudices.