The season of Lent has folded its soft, brooding wings over the weary devotees of fashion in Washington. Luxuriant wrappers, weak tea, and soft-boiled eggs have succeeded the Eugenie trains, chicken salad, and all those delicious fluids that are supposed to brace the human form divine. The penitential season of Lent is just as fashionable, in its way, as the brilliant season which preceded it. There is nothing left for the “Jenkinses” but “to fold their tents like the Arabs, and as silently steal away.” But as hardy native flowers defy the chilly frost, so Speaker Colfax’s hospitable doors swing upon their noiseless hinges once a week, and the famous house known as the “Sickles mansion” becomes a bee-hive, swarming, overflowing with honeyed humanity; and let it be recorded that no man in Washington is socially so popular, so much beloved, as Schuyler Colfax. General Grant, the man who dwells behind a mask, is worshiped by the multitudes, who rush to his mansion as Hindoos to a Buddhist temple; but Schuyler Colfax possesses the magic quality of knowing how to leave the Speaker’s desk, and, gracefully descending to the floor, place himself amongst the masses of the American people, no longer above them, but with them, one of them--a king of hearts in his own right; a knave also, because he steals first and commands afterwards. It is needless to say that all adjectives descriptive of fashionable life at the capital have long since been worn thread-bare. Why didn’t Jenkins tell the truth and say, instead of “warm cordiality, elegant courtesy,” pump-handle indifference and metallic smile? Why did he not tell the dear, good people at home the truth, and nothing but the truth, and say that madame the duchess practices smiles or grimaces before the glass, and serves the same up to her dear friends at her evening receptions? Why should not a smile fit as well as her corsets or kid gloves? Too much smile without dimples to cover up the defect destroys the harmonious relation of the features. Not only that, but it invites every fashionable woman’s horror. It paves the way to wrinkles, the death-blows of every belle. “Look at my face,” says Madame B----, of Baltimore, the widow of royalty, the handsomest woman of three-score years and ten in America, addressing one who shall be nameless. “You are not half my age, and yet you have more wrinkles than I; shall I tell you why?” “To be sure, Madame B----.” “I never laugh; I never cry; I make repose my study.” Now, let it be added that this aged belle of a long-since-departed generation on every night encases her taper fingers in metallic thimbles, and has done so for the last forty years; consequently her hand retains much of its original symmetry, and the decay of her charms is as sweet and as faultless as the falling leaves of a rose.