possibly, but for all that sufficiently fascinating.

Let us look at one of its scenes: not a "state sociable" nor a hotel
"hop," and not a President's "levee." There are fine ladies who have
lived forty years in Washington without attending that pandemonium,
the levee, where the crowd seizes one with a hundred hands till
flounce and furbelow are crushed in its grasp, and where, while the
court reigns in the Blue Room, the mob are disporting themselves in
the magnificence of the East Room, the parlor of the people, where
they have the reddest of red curtains, the broadest of gold cornices,
the portraits of their public servants in the panels between square
rods of looking-glass; where the huge chandeliers shine with a
thousand pendants and a thousand jets, and where, because foreign
crowds tread bare marble floors, they have on theirs a tufted velvet,
and so revolve rejoicing on the biggest carpet in the world, like the
medley of a vast kaleidoscope--old people with one foot in the grave,
children in arms, a bride with veil and orange-blossoms, cripples,
heroes, dwarfs and beauties, all together. Not on any such scene of
the Season let us look, where the doors are locked behind us at eleven
o'clock, but on one of its "balls and masks begun at midnight, burning
ever to midday." It is like an Aztec revel for its flowers: the great
stairways, leading up and down between the rooms that glow with light
and resound with the tones of flute and violin, are wound with shrubs
where art conceals everything but the branch and blossom; doors are
arched with palms and long banana leaves; flowers swing from lintel
and window and bracket, stream from the pictures, crown the statues;
sprays of dropping vines wreathe the chandeliers that shed the soft
brilliance of wax-lights around them; mantels are covered with moss;
tables are bedded with violets; tall vases overflow with roses and
heliotropes, with cold camellias and burning geraniums; the orchestra