Fliss began her campaign in December shortly after the opening of the session. She was quite as busy weeding out undesirable invitations and discouraging worthless acquaintances as she was angling for the right ones. The thing that surprised her was to find out that the worthless acquaintances included among their number so many people of superficial distinction, but distinction, as she came to find out, that impressed no one except the people on the street. One couldn’t go on the basis of clothes. The smart dressers too often didn’t belong and some one whose suit might be last season’s and whose hair was gray and worn without a Marcel might be a powerful or a charming person--one to cultivate. Her old training in being “nice” to the mothers of her high school friends stood her in good stead here. She knew how to treat older women, what sort of flattery they preferred and what sort of deference they exacted. Always she watched for Matthew’s approval. She was interested in seeing the way so many Washington women followed every step of their husbands’ progress, and knew how to talk about it and how not to talk about it. She was not informed enough to get much of a grasp of big happenings, but she had an uncanny gift for getting at the pet phrases of people and never blundered as she repeated them. Then, too, she did not talk much and she read the newspapers for an hour every morning. She was flowering, growing up, out of the little social climber she had been into the woman of social strength that she meant to be. Brilliant, colorful, utilitarian in every phase of her philosophy, except in that weakness which showed again and again in her efforts to reach Matthew. In February she gave her first dinner. It was a small dinner, the dozen guests chosen with the utmost care and good taste. No one was there whom she did not have the right to ask, no one who would not feel in easy company with the rest of the guests, no one who was not a person of distinction either personally or by connection. She had appealed quite frankly to Mrs. Gates for advice, on the score of youth and not wishing to appear presumptuous, and Mrs. Gates had given her exceptionally good advice. “Don’t try to do much, my dear. It’s apt to irritate people, especially at the height of the season when people are crowded. All you have to do here this year is to let people know that you are here. If you want to give a small dinner, let’s see (she looked at her calendar), try the third week in February.” “It’s awfully good of you, Mrs. Gates, to help me. I feel so young and sometimes rather stranded because, you see, I never had to go ahead alone before. And after mother died, less than a year ago, I haven’t felt much like going out or being gay. I miss her, sadly.”