The reception at the White House was being given in honour of the delegates to a Peace Congress.

The rooms were full without being inconveniently crowded and the charming house opened its friendly doors to a society more congruous and organic, richer also in the nobler kind of variety than America, perhaps, can offer to her guests elsewhere.
What the opera and international finance are to New York, politics and administration are, as we all know, to Washington.

And the visitor from Europe, conversationally starved for want of what seem to him the only topics worth discussing, finds himself within hearing once more of ministers, cabinets, embassies, and parliamentary gossip.
Even General Hobson had come to admit that--especially for the middle-aged--Washington parties were extremely agreeable.

The young and foolish might sigh for the flesh-pots of New York; those on whom "the black ox had trodden," who were at all aware what a vast tormenting, multitudinous, and headstrong world man has been given to inhabit; those who were engaged in governing any part of that world, or meant some day to be thus engaged; for them Washington was indispensable, and New York a mere entertainment.
Moreover Washington, at this time of the world's history, was the scene of one of those episodes--those brisker moments in the human comedy--which every now and then revive among us an almost forgotten belief in personality, an almost forgotten respect for the mysteries behind it.

The guests streaming through the White House defiled past a man who, in a level and docketed world, appeared to his generation as the reincarnation of forces primitive, over-mastering, and heroic.