Page:The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina's Reasons, The Path of Duty, Four Meetings (Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1885).djvu/120

116 Mrs. Bonnycastle had endeavored more than once to explain to him the principles on which she received certain people and ignored certain others; but it was with difficulty that he entered into her discriminations. She perceived differences where he only saw resemblances, and both the merits and defects of a good many members of Washington society, as that society was interpreted to him by Mrs. Bonnycastle, he was often at a loss to understand. Fortunately she had a fund of good humor which, as I have intimated, was apt to come uppermost with the April blossoms, and which made the people she did not invite to her house almost as amusing to her as those she did. Her husband was not in politics, though politics were much in him; but the couple had taken upon themselves the responsibilities of an active patriotism; they thought it right to live in America, differing therein from many of their acquaintances, who only thought it pleasant. They had that burden some heritage of foreign reminiscence with which so many Americans are saddled; but they carried it more easily than most of their country-people, and you knew they had lived in Europe only by their present exultation, never in the least by their regrets. Their regrets, that is, were only for their ever having lived there, as Mrs. Bonnycastle once told the wife of a foreign minister. They solved all their problems successfully, including those of knowing none of the people they did not wish to, and of finding plenty of occupation in a society supposed to be meagrely