The sun was shining warm on the asphalt when he stepped out of the Pennsylvania Depot with his bag in his hand, and put it into the hansom that drove up for him.  The sky overhead was of an intense blue that made him remember the Boston sky as pale and grey; when the hansom tilted out into the Avenue he had a joyous glimpse of the White House; of the Capitol swimming like a balloon in the cloudless air.  A keen March breeze swept the dust before him, and through its veil the classic Treasury Building showed like one edifice standing perfect amid ruin represented by the jag-tooth irregularities of the business architecture along the wide street.

He had never been in Washington before, and he had a confused sense of having got back to Rome, which he remembered from his boyish visit.  Throughout his stay he seemed to be coming up against the facade of the Temple of Neptune; but it was the Patent Office, or the Treasury Building, or the White House, and under the gay Southern sky this reversion to the sensations of a happier time began at once, and made itself a lasting relief.  He felt a lift in his spirits from the first.  They gave him a room at Wormley’s, where the chairs comported themselves as self-respectfully upon two or three legs as they would have done at Boston upon four; the cooking was excellent, and a mercenary welcome glittered from all the kind black faces around him.  After the quiet of Ponkwasset and the rush of New York, the lazy ease of the hotel pleased him; the clack of boots over its pavements, the clouds of tobacco smoke, the Southern and Western accents, the spectacle of people unexpectedly encountering and recognising each other in the office and the dining-room, all helped to restore him to a hopefuller mood.  Without asking his heart too curiously why, he found it lighter; he felt that he was still young.

In the weather he had struck a cold wave, and the wind was bitter in the streets, but they were full of sun; he found the grass green in sheltered places, and in one of the Circles he plucked a blossomed spray from an adventurous forceythia.  This happened when he was walking from Wormley’s to the Arlington by a roundabout way of his own involuntary invention, and he had the flowers in his button-hole when Lafflin was pointed out to him in the reading room there, and he introduced himself.  Lafflin had put his hat far back on his head, and was intensely chewing a toothpick, with an air of rapture from everything about him.  He seemed a very simple soul to Dan’s inexperience of men, and the young fellow had no difficulty in committing him to a fair conditional arrangement.  He was going to stay some days in Washington, and he promised other interviews, so that Dan thought it best to stay too.  He used a sheet of the Arlington letter-paper in writing his father of what he had done; and then, as Lafflin had left him, he posted his letter at the clerk’s desk, and wandered out through a corridor different from that which he had come in