"I've just the right girl for you," she says, "and she is here in this ball-room. She is all these things—and some more; the rightest, smartest girl in all our state—Miss Virginia Bauregard, daughter of Mr. Calhoun Bauregard, of Belle Manor in King and Queen county."
Apparently they are all named Virginia in Richmond, seemingly three-quarters of these girls who live in the nicer parts of the town are thus to bespeak through their lives the affectionate loyalty of their parents to the Old Dominion.
All these folk come quite easily to the transformation that has come over the South within the decade, since she ceased to grieve over a past that could never be brought back and overcome. The young boys and the young girls turn readily from fine horses to fine motor cars, the coming of imported customs causes few shocks, it is even rumored that the newest of the new dances have invaded the sober drawing-rooms of the place. But the New South is kind to Richmond. She does not seek to eliminate the Old South. And so the old customs and the old traditions run side by side with the new. And even the old families seem to soften and many times to welcome the new.
*****
If you wish to see the real Old South in Richmond go out to Hollywood cemetery, which is perhaps the greatest of all its landmarks. It is easy of access, very beautiful, although not in the elaborate and immaculate fashion of Greenwood, at Brooklyn, or Mount Auburn, just outside of Boston. But where man has fallen short at Hollywood, Nature has more than done her part. She rounded the lovely hills upon which Richmond might place the treasure-chest of her memories, and then she swept the finest of all Virginia rivers—the James—by those hills. Man did the rest. It was man who created the roadways and who placed the monuments. And not the least interesting of these is the strange tomb of President James Monroe, an imposing bronze structure, in these days reminding one of an enlarged bird-cage. It is interesting perhaps because nearby there is another grave—the grave of still another man who came to the highest office of the American people. The second grave is marked by a small headstone, scarcely large enough to accommodate its two words: "John Tyler."
But more interesting than these older monuments is the group that stands alone, at the far corner of the cemetery and atop of one of those little hillocks close beside the river. The head of that family is buried beneath his effigy. It is the grave of Jefferson Davis, who stands facing the city, as if he still dreamed of the days that might have been but never were. And close beside is the grave of his little girl, "The Daughter of Confederacy." When she died, only a few years since, the South felt that the last of the living links that tied it with the days when men fought and died for the Lost Cause had been severed. It was then that it set to work to build the new out of the old.
Nowadays the Old South does not come publicly into the streets of Richmond—save on that memorable occasion in the spring of 1907 when a feeble trail of aging men—all that remained of a great gray army—limped down a triumphant path through the heart of the town. The Old South sits in her dead cities, and perhaps that is the reason why the Southerner so quickly takes the stranger within his gates to the cemetery. It is his apologies for thirty or forty years lost in the march of progress. And it is an apology that no man of breadth or generosity can refuse to accept.
*****
Here, then, is the new Richmond, riding stoutly upon her great hills and shooting the tendrils of her growth in every direction. For she is growing, rapidly and handsomely. Her new buildings—her wonderful cathedral, her superb modern hotels, the fine homes multiplying out by the Lee statue—what self-respecting southern town does not have a Lee statue—all bespeak the quality of her growth. But her new buildings cannot easily surpass the old. It was rare good judgment in an American town for her to refrain from tearing down or even "modernizing" that Greek temple that stands atop of Schokoe hill and which generations have known as the Capitol. The two flanking wings which were made absolutely necessary by the awakening of the Old Dominion have not robbed the older portion of the building of one whit of its charm.
It typifies the Old South and the New South, come to stand beside one another. In other days Virginia was proud of her capital, it was with no small pride that she thrust it ahead when a seat of government was to be chosen for the Confederacy, that for a little time she saw it take its stormy place among the nations of the world. In these days Virginia may still be proud of her capital town—it is still a seat of government quite worthy of a state of pride and of traditions.