“A plain celestial blue satin with a white satin petticoat.  On the neck a very large Italian gauze handkerchief with white satin stripes.  The head-dress was a puff of gauze in the form of a globe on a foundation of white satin, having a double wing in large plaits, with a wreath of roses twined about it.  The hair was dressed with detached curls, four each side of the neck and a floating chignon behind.”

“Another was a periot made of gray Indian taffetas with dark stripes of the same color with two collars, one white, one yellow with blue silk fringe, having a reverse trimmed in the same manner.  Under the periot was a yellow corset of cross blue stripes.  Around the bosom of the periot was a frill of white vandyked gauze of the same form covered with black gauze which hangs in streamers down her back.  Her hair behind is a large braid with a monstrous crooked comb.”

We cannot say that the society of the new capital was notable for its intellect or for the intellectual turn of its activities.  John Adams’ daughter declared that it was “quite enough dissipated,” and indeed costly dress, card playing, and dancing seem to have received an undue amount of society’s attention.  The Philadelphia belle, Miss Franks, wrote home:  “Here you enter a room with a formal set courtesy, and after the ‘How-dos’ things are finished, all a dead calm until cards are introduced when you see pleasure dancing in the eyes of all the matrons, and they seem to gain new life; the maidens decline for the pleasure of making love.  Here it is always leap year.  For my part I am used to another style of behavior.”  And, continues Miss Franks:  “They (the Philadelphia girls) have more cleverness in the turn of the eye than those of New York in their whole composition.”  But blunt, old Governor Livingston, on the other hand, wrote his daughter Kitty that “the Philadelphia flirts are equally famous for their want of modesty and want of patriotism in their over-complacence to red coats, who would not conquer the men of the country, but everywhere they have taken the women almost without a trial—­damm them."[219]

But there can be no doubt that the whirl of life was a little too giddy in New York, during the last years of the eighteenth century; and that, as a visiting Frenchman declared:  “Luxury is already forming in this city, a very dangerous class of men, namely, the bachelors, the extravagance of the women makes them dread marriage."[220] As mentioned above, there was much card playing among the women, and on the then fashionable John Street married women sometimes lost as high as $400 in a single evening of gambling.  To some of the older men who had suffered the hardships of war that the new nation might be born, such frivolity and extravagance seemed almost a crime, and doubtless these veterans would have agreed with Governor Livingston when he complained:  “My principal Secretary of State, who is one of my daughters, has gone to New York to shake her heels at the balls and assemblies of a metropolis which might be better employed, more studious of taxes than of instituting expensive diversions."[221]