In the year 1881 Lady Curzon's family joined that ever-increasing colony at Washington that is made up of wealth and leisure. It has in recent years become a distinctive feature of the capital, its members having built there some of the handsome homes that adorn the city, and which they occupy usually for a few months each year. Their social functions are attended with much magnificence, and they have the _entrée_ to official society, and frequently to that exclusive circle of aristocratic old families, many of whom have lived there in unostentatious elegance ever since the nation transferred its capital to the banks of the Potomac. For a time Mary Leiter attended the school in Washington founded some years ago by Madam Burr and subsequently conducted by her daughters. She was a good student. Quiet in her manner, she emitted only occasionally that sparkle of wit or fun that so often flashes from the happy school girl of fourteen. She exercised, however, a fascination to which both her teachers and companions were susceptible. Her beauty of face, her pose and carriage, together with a sweet, girlish modesty and a graciousness that was simple and unaffected, rendered her at all times most attractive. The greater part of Miss Leiter's education, however, was conducted at home, under governesses, and her individual tastes and talents thus developed. Travel, and a more or less prolonged residence abroad at various times under most happy circumstances, cultivated her powers of observation and developed in her that breadth of mental vision that at an unusually early period not only removed the crudities of youth, but gave her that poise and finish that made her so charming to men and women of mature and brilliant intellect. Comparatively little was heard of her family socially till after her _début_, which occurred in the winter of 1888, and their present social prominence in the United States is due to the remarkable impression she everywhere created. As a new-comer she was viewed critically, for she aimed always at the highest and best in the social castes of her country. She was weighed in the balance with the daughters of better known and longer established families of the East, and was found their equal in beauty and breeding and frequently their peer in charm of manner and intellect. In Washington her father leased the home, on Dupont Circle, of the late James G. Blaine, and there Miss Leiter spent the first years of her young womanhood, during which such homage was paid her that she never entered a drawing-room nor crossed a ball-room without attracting the attention and gaze of every one. She planned and directed the numerous social functions given there by her parents on a scale of magnificence that was not easily approached, and she brought to the house a fame such as it never derived from the occupancy of its distinguished owner nor any of his family.