Description
At age thirty, Madeleine Lee, a wealthy, wellborn widow, has tired of Gilded Age New York and its shallow society. She decides to spend the winter in Washington with her sister, renting a house on Lafayette Square, within easy reach of all the intense partying, horse-trading, and other activities that politics requires.
As she makes friends (and enemies) with the locals, one question remains uppermost in Madeleine Lee’s mind: “Who, then, is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right. There is only one thing in life that I must and will have before I die. I must know whether America is...