“I am not sure,” he said, as they were driving one day, “that it is not now the handsomest capital in the world; at any rate, it is on its way to be that.  No other has public buildings more imposing, or streets and avenues so attractive in their interrupted regularity, so many stately vistas ending in objects refreshing to the eye—­a bit of park, banks of flowers, a statue or a monument that is decorative, at least in the distance.  As the years go on we shall have finer historical groups, triumphal arches and columns that will give it more and more an air of distinction, the sort of splendor with which the Roman Empire celebrated itself, and, added to this, the libraries and museums and galleries that are the chief attractions of European cities.  Oh, we have only just begun—­the city is so accessible in all directions, and lends itself to all sorts of magnificence and beauty.”

“I declare,” said Mrs. Morgan to Margaret, “I didn’t know that he could be so eloquent.  Page, you ought to be in Congress.”

“In order to snuff myself out?  Congress is not so important a feature as it used to be.  Washington is getting to have a character of its own; it seems as if it wouldn’t be much without its official life, yet the process is going on here that is so marked all over the country—­the divorce of social and political life.  I used to think, fifteen years ago, that Washington was a standing contradiction to the old aphorism that a democracy cannot make society—­there was no more agreeable society in the world than that in Washington even ten years ago:  society selected itself somehow without any marked class distinction, and it was delightfully simple and accessible.”

“And what has changed it?” Margaret asked.

“Money, which changes everything and everybody.  The whole scale has altered.  There is so much more display and expense.  I remember when a private carriage in Washington was a rare object.  The possession of money didn’t help one much socially.  What made a person desired in any company was the talent of being agreeable, talent of some sort, not the ability to give a costly dinner or a big ball.”

“But there are more literary and scientific people here, everybody says,” said Margaret, who was becoming a partisan of the city.

“Yes, and they keep more to themselves—­withdraw into their studies, or hive in their clubs.  They tell me that the delightful informality and freedom of the old life is gone.  Ask the old Washington residents whether the coming in of rich people with leisure hasn’t demoralized society, or stiffened it, and made it impossible after the old sort.  It is as easy here now as anywhere else to get together a very heavy dinner party—­all very grand, but it isn’t amusing.  It is more and more like New York.”

“But we have been to delightful dinners,” Margaret insisted.

“No doubt.  There are still houses of the old sort, where wit and good-humor and free hospitality are more conspicuous than expense; but when money selects, there is usually an incongruous lot about the board.  An oracular scientist at the club the other night put it rather neatly when he said that a society that exists mainly to pay its debts gets stupid.”