"Mawtha," said the little girl's mother, after the caller had departed, "you must not ask people where they were bo'n. If they were bo'n in Va'ginia they will tell you so without asking, and if they weren't bo'n in Va'ginia it's very embarrassing."
Some of the old families of the inner circle are in a tragic state of decay, owing to inbreeding; others, in a more wholesome physical and mental condition, are perpetually wrestling with the heritage of poverty left over from the War—"too proud to whitewash and too poor to paint"—clinging desperately to the old acres, and to the old houses which are like beautiful, tired ancestral ghosts.
Until a few years ago the one resource of Virginian gentlewomen in need of funds was to take boarders, but more lately the daughters of distinguished but poverty-stricken families have found that they may work in offices. Thus, in the town of which I speak, several ladies who are very much "in society," support themselves by entertaining "paying guests," while others are stenographers. The former, I was told, by the way, make it a practice to avoid first-hand business contacts with their guests by sending them their bills through the mail, and requiring that response be made by means of the same impersonal channel.
CHAPTER XXI
THE CONFEDERATE CAPITAL
The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Richmond is the Boston of Virginia; Norfolk its New York. The comparison does not, of course, hold in all particulars, Richmond being, for instance, larger than Norfolk, and not a seaport. Yet, on the other hand, Boston manages, more than any seaport that I know of, to conceal from the visitor the signs of its maritime life; wherefore Richmond looks about as much like a port as does the familiar part of Boston.
The houses on the principal residence streets of Richmond are not built in such close ranks as Boston houses; they have more elbow-room; numbers of them have yards and gardens; and there is not about Richmond houses the Bostonian insistence upon red brick; nevertheless many houses of both cities give off the same suggestion of having long been lived in by the descendants of their builders. So, too, though the Capitol at Richmond has little architectural resemblance to Boston's gold-domed State House—the former having been copied by Thomas Jefferson from the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, and being a better building than the Massachusetts State House, and better placed—the two do, nevertheless, suggest each other in their gray granite solidity.
It is perhaps in the quality of solidity—architectural, commercial, social, even spiritual—that Richmond and Boston are most alike. Substantialness, conservatism, tradition, and prosperity rest like gray mantles over both.