THOSE first months in Washington took all the concentrated social skill of Fliss. They were months when she felt with confusion that she was playing a game with experts who could not be tricked. In the first place she was only twenty-five, and youth, except in a débutante, was an anomaly in the groups to which she sought ingress. The wives of the other Senators had fifteen to forty years more to their credit than had she. In Carrington her youth had been an asset. The older matrons petted her and the younger ones envied her. But this was different. The qualities which were at a premium here were not mere dash and chic style and dancing ability. It took brains to be singled out here.
Luckily she had plenty of money, and she had availed herself of every possible letter of introduction before she left Carrington. There were people in Carrington who knew the people whose names she had studied in the Washington papers and she had managed, not seeming too eager, to have a letter written here and one there, and to see that the letters were followed up. Her first two weeks had been spent in house-hunting, during which she had had occasion to bless Matthew a thousand times for his affluence and generosity. She found at last what she wanted in the proper part of town—a conventional, not too large city house, tenanted by a Senator’s family last year. The Senator had gone to a club when his family went to Europe, and the house was available at an enormous rental. It had the advantage of having been decorated the year before by the Senator’s wife and done in admirable taste. Fliss sought an interior decorator, and with an uncanny shrewdness furnished it. There was enough of the solid to keep it from appearing faddish or nouveau; there was enough of the ugly to set off the beautiful. There was, last and most of all, quite enough of the beautiful to prove her taste.
The first weeks in Washington reminded Fliss somewhat grimly of her early encounters in Carrington. She went through the ordeal of the social column again—the ordeal of those who read about the functions to which they aspire and at which they were not attendant. Society columns are easy reading only for those who are quite indifferent to personal mention or omission, and they, of course, are the people who do not make a business of reading them. But Fliss had the comfort of never becoming despondent as she had in the old Carrington days. She had tools ready to her hand now and she meant to forge her way with them. More than that, she had found a work which was going to need all her wits and all her energies.
Matthew was busy constantly. He had been chosen for a good deal of routine committee work to break him in, and he had little time for Fliss and the observation of her labors. They went out together more than they had in Carrington, but it was to more formal affairs.
“Washington doesn’t tend to make you chummy,” she said, one night, leaning up against Matthew in the car as they were being whirled homeward after a rather colorless dinner.
“Finding it hard work?” he asked.
“I love it,” she said lazily. “I love the sense of social intrigue. There’s something to get your teeth into here. A lot to fight for. Out in Carrington, if you do get to the top, what is there at the top except Mrs. Silverton’s dinners? It’s fun, I mean, but it stops. You can see the top. Here it’s so much more tangled, but so much more interesting.”
“You’re doing it very well,” answered Matthew. “You quite charmed Senator Gates to-night. How did you do it?”
“Listened to him. Isn’t it queer how simple it is, as well as being so difficult? All I did was to flatter him a little—most of that by looking at him. But I had to be careful not to do it too much, because I mustn’t get the reputation of being a Western vamp. It’s just drawing that line.”
“Clever girl!”