Washington in those days was a simple, merry place, with a delightful and unique society based upon official rank, and a few old resident families, who were in society when Abigail Adams had the clothes dried in the East Room of the White House. Elizabeth remembered that she had been a great belle with gay young army and navy men and sprigs of diplomats and was not unhappy, although she had felt at every turn the prick of poverty. She had been ashamed to complain, however, in the presence of General Brandon’s cheerful submission. He had his compensations, though,—chiefly his evening visits to and from other grizzled officers of both sides, when they sat and talked gravely and tensely of issues as dead as Julius Cæsar, and solemnly discussed what might have been, to an accompaniment of whiskey and cigars. General Brandon’s whiskey and cigars were poor—he smoked a pipe himself, declaring he preferred it. But no army man of any rank ever animadverted on the General’s whiskey or cigars; and, although both were evilly cheap, they drank and smoked cheerfully, with a relish for the man if not for his entertainment.
General Brandon had no knowledge of the words “getting on in society,” or anything like them. He belonged to that sturdy oligarchy in Virginia which, whatever might be its shortcomings, knew nothing of snobs or snobbery, because everybody was just as good as everybody else. But his social career had been such that the newly rich might have asked him his patent for knowing everybody worth knowing. He was asked everywhere in those days, which he took as a matter of course, just as, during his occasional brief sojourns in England during his Egyptian days, he was asked everywhere and took it as a matter of course. Your true Virginian has many faults and some vices, but he is socially the wisest person in the world because he is the simplest. Nobody can patronize him, nobody can snub him. He takes the notice of royalty with the same unconscious ease that he does the rapturous salutation of a negro barber who belonged to him “befo’ de war, sir,”—always polite, considerate, mindful of the small, sweet courtesies of life.
There is but one section of society with which he cannot get on. This is the newly rich smart set, fresh from the forge, the shop, the mine, the liquor saloon—that rapid fungus which has grown up in America during the last forty years, of which it has been said that no parallel exists to its license and irresponsibility, unless one goes back to the later Roman and Byzantine emperors. This class is free with a freedom that is staggering to contemplate; free from any traditions of the past, any responsibility in the present, any accountability to the future; free to marry, to be divorced, to live where it likes, to change its residence every week in the year; free from the care of the few children they have, free from taxes as far as rank perjury goes, and free to command all the science of the world to keep death at bay as long as possible. The advent of this class anywhere changes the aspect of things, and therefore when it moved in columns upon Washington, the people of General Brandon’s class and Elizabeth’s time became “Cave–dwellers,” and the General was asked “nowhere,”—that is, he was still asked, but it was “nowhere.” The General, however, did not know this at the time, or ever afterwards.