Mrs. Bonnycastle had endeavoured 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. American promiscuity, goodness knew, had been
strange to him, but it was nothing to the queerness of American
criticism. This lady would discourse to him a perte de vue on
differences where he only saw resemblances, and both the merits and
the defects of a good many members of Washington society, as this
society was interpreted to him by Mrs. Bonnycastle, he was often at
a loss to understand. Fortunately she had a fund of good humour
which, as I have intimated, was apt to come uppermost with the April
blossoms and which made the people she didn't 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, with some grimness, thought it
inevitable. They had that burdensome heritage of foreign
reminiscence with which so many Americans were saddled; but they
carried it more easily than most of their country-people, and one
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
didn't wish to, and of finding plenty of occupation in a society
supposed to be meagrely provided with resources for that body which
Vogelstein was to hear invoked, again and again, with the mixture of
desire and of deprecation that might have attended the mention of a
secret vice, under the name of a leisure-class. When as the warm