greenest of oases in the whirling breathless sandstorms of that social
Sahara. But even Betty Madison, strong as she was both in position and
personality, met with but a moderate success. When women have from six
to twenty-five calls to pay every afternoon of the season, with at
least one tea a day besides, they have little time or inclination for
pleasant informalities. Doubtless Miss Madison's friends felt that
they should be relieved of the additional tax. Even the women of the
fashionable set, which includes some of the Old Washingtonians and
many newer comers of equally high degree, and which ignores the
official set, preserve the same ridiculous fashion of calling in
person six days in the week instead of merely leaving cards as in
older and more civilized communities. In London, society has learned
to combine the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of work.
Washington society is its antithesis; and although many of the most
brilliant men in America are in its official set, and the brightest
and most charming women in its fashionable as well as political set,
they are, through the exigencies of the old social structure, of
little use to each other. Betty occasionally managed to capture three
or four people who talked delightfully when they felt they had time to
indulge in consecutive sentences, but as a rule people came on her
reception day only, and many of them walked in at one door of her
drawing-room and out at the other.

The debate in the Senate on the payment of bonds interested her
deeply, for she knew that it meant days of uneasiness for Senator
North, who rarely was absent from his seat. His brief speech on the
subject was the finest she had heard him make, and although it was
bitter and sarcastic while he was arraigning the adherents of the
resolution to pay the government debt in silver, he became impersonal
and almost impassioned as he argued in behalf of national honesty.