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“Good-bye, Count Vogelstein,” said Pandora, who was a little flushed with her various exertions but didn’t look the worse for it. “I hope you’ll have a splendid time and appreciate our country.”

“I hope you’ll get through all right,” Vogelstein answered, smiling and feeling himself already more idiomatic.

“That gentleman’s sick that I wrote to,” she rejoined; “isn’t it too bad? But he sent me down a letter to a friend of his–one of the examiners–and I guess we won’t have any trouble. Mr. Lansing, let me make you acquainted with Count Vogelstein,” she went on, presenting to her fellow-passenger the wearer of the straw hat and the breastpin, who shook hands with the young German as if he had never seen him before. Vogelstein’s heart rose for an instant to his throat; he thanked his stars he hadn’t offered a tip to the friend of a gentleman who had often been mentioned to him and who had also been described by a member of Pandora’s family as Pandora’s lover.

“It’s a case of ladies this time,” Mr. Lansing remarked to him with a smile which seemed to confess surreptitiously, and as if neither party could be eager, to recognition.

“Well, Mr. Bellamy says you’ll do anything for HIM,” Pandora said, smiling very sweetly at Mr. Lansing. “We haven’t got much; we’ve been gone only two years.”

Mr. Lansing scratched his head a little behind, with a movement that sent his straw hat forward in the direction of his nose. “I don’t know as I’d do anything for him that I wouldn’t do for you,” he responded with an equal geniality. “I guess you’d better open that one”–and he gave a little affectionate kick to one of the trunks.

“Oh mother, isn’t he lovely? It’s only your sea-things,” Pandora cried, stooping over the coffer with the key in her hand.

“I don’t know as I like showing them,” Mrs. Day modestly murmured.

Vogelstein made his German salutation to the company in general, and to Pandora he offered an audible good-bye, which she returned in a bright friendly voice, but without looking round as she fumbled at the lock of her trunk.

“We’ll try another, if you like,” said Mr. Lansing good-humouredly.

“Oh no it has got to be this one! Good-bye, Count Vogelstein. I hope you’ll judge us correctly!”

The young man went his way and passed the barrier of the dock. Here he was met by his English valet with a face of consternation which led him to ask if a cab weren’t forthcoming.

“They call ’em ‘acks ‘ere, sir,” said the man, “and they’re beyond everything. He wants thirty shillings to take you to the inn.”

Vogelstein hesitated a moment. “Couldn’t you find a German?”

“By the way he talks he IS a German said the man; and in a moment Count Otto began his career in America by discussing the tariff of hackney-coaches in the language of the fatherland.

CHAPTER II

He went wherever he was asked, on principle, partly to study American society and partly because in Washington pastimes seemed to him not so numerous that one could afford to neglect occasions. At the end of two winters he had naturally had a good many of various kinds–his study of American society had yielded considerable fruit. When, however, in April, during the second year of his residence, he presented himself at a large party given by Mrs. Bonnycastle and of which it was believed that it would be the last serious affair of the season, his being there (and still more his looking very fresh and talkative) was not the consequence of a rule of conduct. He went to Mrs. Bonnycastle’s simply because he liked the lady, whose receptions were the pleasantest in Washington, and because if he 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.