I was told of one old unreconstructed Virginian who had to go to Boston on business. The gentleman he went to see there was exceedingly polite to him, asking him to his house, putting him up at his club, and showing him innumerable courtesies. The old Confederate, writing to his wife, indicated his amazement: "Although he is not a Virginian," he declared, "I must confess that he lives like a gentleman." 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.