didn't go there he didn't know what he should do; that absence of
alternatives having become familiar to him by the waters of the
Potomac. There were a great many things he did because if he didn't
do them he didn't know what he should do. It must be added that in
this case even if there had been an alternative he would still have
decided to go to Mrs. Bonnycastle's. If her house wasn't 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 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--under this magic of expansion and condonation Mrs.
Bonnycastle, who during the winter had been a good deal on the
defensive, relaxed her vigilance a little, became whimsically
wilful, 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 prove
a mistake. But Washington life, to Count Otto's apprehension, was
paved with mistakes; he felt himself in a society founded on
fundamental fallacies and triumphant blunders. 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 great
Republic would be to burn one's standards and warm one's self at the
blaze. Such were the reflexions of a theoretic Teuton who now
walked for the most part amid the ashes of his prejudices.