Writing about sleep has driven off my fit of wakefulness. I'll only add that Lu Frayne's in town, working day and night to get her husband transferred from San Francisco to the War Department here. I think she'll win out, as she's got two Senators who've been frightening the President by acting queerly lately. It's too funny! When the new Administration came every one was scared because the rumor got round that he was going to give us a repetition of the Cleveland nightmare. But there was nothing in it; the only "pulls" that have failed to work are those that were strong with the last Administration, and there's a whole crop of new pulls. Well, at least, the right sort of people, those who have family and position, are getting their rights to preference as they never did before. We've not had many Presidents who knew the right sort of people even when they've been willing to please them, if they could pick them out. What a changed Washington it is: so many formalities; so many rich people; so many rich men, and men of family and position in office; so many big, fine houses and English and French servants. "Such a stylishness!" January 14. Our first big dance last night--I mean, formal dance to show our strength. Everybody was here, and the dinner beforehand and the supper afterward and all the mechanical arrangements, so to speak, were perfect. The ball-room was a sight--even "ma" Burke, tired to death, perked up. Almost all the diplomats, except those nobody asks, were here. And I don't think more than thirty people we hadn't invited ventured to come. We were all so excited that, after the last people had gone, we sat round for nearly an hour. "Ma" Burke took me in her arms and kissed me. "It was your ball," said she. "But then, everything we get credit for is all yours; ain't it, pa?" "Miss Talltowers has certainly done wonderfully," said "pa" in his cautious, judicial way. Then he seemed ashamed of himself, as if he had been ungenerous, and shook hands with me and added: "Thank you, thank you, Miss Augusta--if you'll permit me the liberty of calling you so." "I never expected to see as pretty a girl as you bothering to have brains," Mrs. Burke went on to say. And for the first time in weeks and weeks it occurred to me that I did have a personal existence apart from my work--the books and bookkeeping, the servants and the housekeeper, who is only one more to fuss with, the tradespeople, and musicians, and singers, and florists, and--it makes my head whirl to try to recall the awful list. "She won't be pretty very long," said Cyrus--he's taking lessons of his mother and is dropping his fancy-work speech and his "made-in-Germany" manners--"if she don't stop working day _and_ night."