The name of his Bostonian acquaintance was John Quincy Adams.

I heard this story from a northern lady who has a country place near a small town in Virginia.  In the North this lady’s family is far from being unknown, but in Virginia, she assured me, all persons originating outside the State are looked upon as vague beings without “family.”

“They seem to think,” she said, “that Northerners have no parents—­that they are made chemically.”

This does not imply, however, that well-bred Northerners are excluded from society.  Even if they are well off they may get into society; for though money does not count in one’s favor in such a town, it does not count against one.  The social requirement of the place is simple.  If people are “nice people,” that is enough.

Of course, however, it is one thing to be admitted to Virginia society and another to belong to it by right.  A case in point is that of a lady visiting in a Virginia city who, while calling at the house of some “F.F.V’s,” was asked by a little girl, the daughter of the house, where she had been born.

“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.