Shortly before we left Manila to take up our residence in Washington we decided to give a final and memorable entertainment. We wanted it to be something original, so we discussed it and pondered over it at great length. We thought we had given every kind of party that ingenuity could devise during our residence at Malacañan, but one evening, sitting out on the verandah looking across the still, softly-lapping river at the low-hung lights on the opposite bank, it suddenly occurred to me that we had an ideal setting for a Venetian Carnival, and a Venetian Carnival was settled upon without further ado. It was to be a masked ball, the front gates of the Palace grounds were to be closed and everybody was to come by boat to the river landing on the verandah below.

As soon as this plan was noised abroad the town was agog with excitement. The first question, of course, to occur to everybody was: “What shall I go as?” And pretty soon every woman in town, and many men, assumed that labouredly innocent air peculiar to a period of preparation for a masked ball in a community where everybody knows or wants to know all about everybody else.