A rough Western politician arrives in Washington determined to be President, and a woman of the capital's best society decides to take him in hand - and each is using the other with complete clarity. Phillips was the muckraker whose Treason of the Senate so enraged Roosevelt that the President coined the word to insult him; he was shot dead in the street at forty-three, and the Washington here is drawn from his own reporting. Fifty-nine plates, from Henry Sargent's The Dinner Party to Thomas Nast's cartoons, catch the capital's drawing rooms, teas and dinner tables that Phillips knew firsthand.