But Aunt Frances popped in on them suddenly one day and found a Bohemian party.  There wasn’t anything wrong about it, Grace says, but you know Aunt Frances!  She has never ceased to talk about the frumpy crowd she met there.  She hated the students in their velvet coats and the women with their poor queer clothes.  And Grace loved them.  But she’s given up the idea of ever living there again.  She says you can’t do a thing twice and have it the same.  I don’t know.  I only know that Grace may seem frivolous on the outside, but that underneath she is different.  She has taken up advanced ideas about women, and she says that I have them naturally, and that she didn’t expect such a thing in Washington where everybody stops to think what somebody else is going to say.  But I haven’t arrived at the point where I am really interested in Suffrage and things like that.  Grace says that I must begin to look beyond my own life, and perhaps when I get some of my own problems settled, I will.  And then I shall be taking up the problems of the girls in factories and the girls in laundries and the girls in the big shops, as Grace is.  She says that she may live like a bond-slave herself, but she’d like to help other women to be free.

And now I must tell you about Delilah Jeliffe.  She had a house-warming last week.  The old house in Georgetown is a dream.  Delilah hasn’t a superfluous or gorgeous thing in it.  Everything is keyed to the old-family note.  Some of the things are even shabby.  She has done away with flamingo colors, and her monkeys with the crystal ball and the peacock screen.  She has little stools in her drawing-room with faded covers of canvas work, and she has samplers and cracked portraits, and the china doesn’t all match.  There isn’t a sign of “new richness” in the place.  She keeps colored servants, and doesn’t wear rings, and her gowns are frilly flowing white things which make her look like one of those demure grandmotherly young persons of the early sixties.

Her little artist is a charming blond who doesn’t come up to her shoulders, and Delilah hangs on every word he says.  For the moment he obscures all the other men on her horizon.  He made sketches of the way every room in her house ought to look.  And what seems to be the result of years of formal pleasant living really is the result of the months of hunting and hard work which he and Delilah have put in.  He even indicates the flowers she shall wear, and those which are to bloom next summer in her garden.  She affects heliotrope, and on the night of her house-warming she carried a tight bunch of it with a few pink rosebuds.

Really, in her new role Delilah is superb.  And, people are beginning to notice her and to call on her.  Even in this short time she has been invited to some very good houses.  She has a new way with her eyes, and drops her lashes over them, and is very still and lovely.

Do you remember her leopard skins of last year?  Well, now she wears moleskins—­a queer dolman-shaped wrap of them, and a little hat with a dull blue feather, and she drapes a black lace veil over the hat and looks like a duchess.