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.
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