The capital of the Great Republic was a new world to country-bred Washington Hawkins.

St.Louis was a greater city, but its floating.
population did not hail from great distances, and so it had the general family aspect of the permanent population; but Washington gathered its people from the four winds of heaven, and so the manners, the faces and the fashions there, presented a variety that was infinite.

Washington had never been in "society" in St.Louis, and he knew nothing of the ways of its wealthier citizens and had never inspected one of their dwellings.
Consequently, everything in the nature of modern fashion and grandeur was a new and wonderful revelation to him.
Washington is an interesting city to any of us.

It seems to become more and more interesting the oftener we visit it.

Perhaps the reader has never been there?
Very well.