Whether or not the sons were, as young men, peculiarly admirable may be a question. They possessed the faults and the virtues of young men of their kind and condition. They were given to self-indulgence; they were not broad in their limitations; they were apt to contemn what did not accord with their own established views (for their views were established before their mustaches); they were wasteful of time and energies beyond belief; they were addicted to the pursuit of pleasure. They exhibited the customary failings of their kind in a society of an aristocratic character. But they possessed in full measure the corresponding virtues. They were brave, they were generous, they were high-spirited. Indulgence in pleasure did not destroy them. It was the young French noblesse who affected to eschew exertion even to the point of having themselves borne on litters on their boar-hunts, and who yet, with a hundred pounds of iron buckled on their frames, charged like furies at Fontenoy. So these same languid, philandering young gentlemen, when the crucial occasion came, suddenly appeared as the most dashing and indomitable soldiery of modern times. It was the Norfolk company known as the “Dandies” that was extirpated in a single day. But, whatever may be thought of the sons, there can be no question as to the daughters. They were like the mother; made in her own image. They filled a peculiar place in the civilization; the key was set to them. They held by a universal consent the first place in the system, all social life revolving around them. So generally did the life shape itself about the young girl that it was almost as if a bit of the age of chivalry had been blown down the centuries and lodged in the old State. She instinctively adapted herself to it. In fact, she was made for it. She was gently bred: her people for generations (since they had come to Virginia) were gentlefolk. They were so well satisfied that they had been the same in the mother country that they had never taken the trouble to investigate it. She was the incontestable proof of their gentility. In right of her blood (the beautiful Saxon, tempered by the influences of the genial Southern clime), she was exquisite, fine, beautiful; a creature of peach-blossom and snow; languid, delicate, saucy; now imperious, now melting, always bewitching. She was not versed in the ways of the world, but she had no need to be; she was better than that; she was well bred. She had not to learn to be a lady, because she was born one. Generations had given her that by heredity. She grew up apart from the great world. But ignorance of the world did not make her provincial. Her instinct was an infallible guide. When a child she had in her sunbonnet and apron met the visitors at the front steps and entertained them in the parlor until her mother was ready to appear. Thus she had grown up to the duties of hostess. Her manners were as perfectly formed as her mother’s, with perhaps a