Madeleine was sober in her tastes. She wasted no money. She
made no display.

She walked rather than drove, and wore neither diamonds nor
brocades. But the general impression she made was nevertheless
one of luxury. On the other hand, her sister had her dresses from
Paris, and wore them and her ornaments according to all the
formulas; she was good-naturedly correct, and bent her round
white shoulders to whatever burden the Parisian autocrat chose to
put upon them. Madeleine never interfered, and always paid the
bills.

Before they had been ten days in Washington, they fell gently into
their place and were carried along without an effort on the stream
of social life.

Society was kind; there was no reason for its being otherwise. Mrs.
Lee and her sister had no enemies, held no offices, and did their
best to make themselves popular. Sybil had not passed summers at
Newport and winters in New York in vain; and neither her face nor
her figure, her voice nor her dancing, needed apology. Politics
were not her strong point. She was induced to go once to the
Capitol and to sit ten minutes in the gallery of the Senate. No one
ever knew what her impressions were; with feminine tact she
managed not to betray herself But, in truth, her notion of
legislative bodies was vague, floating between her experience at
church and at the opera, so that the idea of a performance of some
kind was never out of her head. To her mind the Senate was a
place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively