Half Loaves by Margaret Culkin Banning

Those first months in Washington took all the concentrated social skill of Fliss. They were months when she felt with confusion that she was playing a game with experts who could not be tricked. In the first place she was only twenty-five, and youth, except in a débutante, was an anomaly in the groups to which she sought ingress. The wives of the other Senators had fifteen to forty years more to their credit than had she. In Carrington her youth had been an asset. The older matrons petted her and the younger ones envied her. But this was different. The qualities which were at a premium here were not mere dash and chic style and dancing ability. It took brains to be singled out here.

Luckily she had plenty of money, and she had availed herself of every possible letter of introduction before she left Carrington. There were people in Carrington who knew the people whose names she had studied in the Washington papers and she had managed, not seeming too eager, to have a letter written here and one there, and to see that the letters were followed up. Her first two weeks had been spent in house-hunting, during which she had had occasion to bless Matthew a thousand times for his affluence and generosity. She found at last what she wanted in the proper part of town -- a conventional, not too large city house, tenanted by a Senator's family last year. The Senator had gone to a club when his family went to Europe, and the house was available at an enormous rental. It had the advantage of having been decorated the year before by the Senator's wife and done in admirable taste. Fliss sought an interior decorator, and with an uncanny shrewdness furnished it. There was enough of the solid to keep it from appearing faddish or nouveau; there was enough of the ugly to set off the beautiful. There was, last and most of all, quite enough of the beautiful to prove her taste.