The materials to form a good dinner abound in Washington, and Constance Maitland knew it. As the smart set in Washington is composed largely of persons who have made large fortunes in trade, and who have come to Washington to enjoy these fortunes, Constance knew that from this particular element she could not well draw the material for a really sparkling dinner. The people in Europe know something after all, and their dictum that an elegant and brilliant society cannot be constructed out of retired merchants has not yet been disproved. Let us be candid to ourselves. But in Washington the materials for a real society exist outside of this element, and Constance Maitland had been lucky enough to find it. Sir Mark le Poer was in town again, which Constance reckoned as a special Providence. Like all Englishmen of good position, Sir Mark was bored within an inch of his life by the Anglo-American girl, who is an easily detected imitation. Constance, having been a friend of Sir Mark’s for many years, and knowing him like a book, spared him this infliction. She selected in the construction of the party Mrs. Willoughby, an accomplished Washington woman, whose family had social antecedents dating back to the days of Abigail Adams. Mrs. Willoughby had been a distinguished hostess for twenty years, until the influx of pork, whiskey, dry-goods, and the like commodities had overwhelmed everything to the manner born. She took it all good-naturedly, and got a great deal of amusement out of the status quo. Then there was Mary Beekman, of New York, young, charming, and rich, whose parents had owned a box at the New York Academy of Music, but who were conspicuously out of it with the Metropolitan Opera set. As Mrs. Willoughby remarked, when Constance mentioned the party she had made up: “What a very interesting collection of has-beens you have got together, my dear.” For the men, besides Crane and Sir Mark le Poer, Constance had secured Thorndyke, an admirable dinner-man, and a courtly old Admiral--for she was quite unlike the widow of a prominent shoe-dealer, who emigrated to Washington and became violently fashionable, and who declared that on her visiting list she “drew the line at the army and navy.” On the evening of the dinner there was to be a belated reception at the White House, in honour of an international commission which had just opened its sittings in Washington, and it was arranged that the dinner should be somewhat early, that the whole party, being invited to the White House, might adjourn there.