ons. Just as the town had battled for a
principle without understanding it, so she was capable of dying for an
idea, but not of conceiving one. She had suffered everything from the
war except the necessity of thinking independently about it, and, though
in later years memory had become so sacred to her that she rarely
indulged in it, she still clung passionately to the habits of her
ancestors under the impression that she was clinging to their ideals.
Little things filled her days--the trivial details of the classroom and
of the market, the small domestic disturbances of her neighbours, the
moral or mental delinquencies of her two coloured servants--and even her
religious veneration for the Episcopal Church had crystallized at last
into a worship of customs.

To-day, at the beginning of the industrial awakening of the South, she
(who was but the embodied spirit of her race) stood firmly rooted in all
that was static, in all that was obsolete and outgrown in the Virginia
of the eighties. Though she felt as yet merely the vague uneasiness with
which her mind recoiled from the first stirrings of change, she was
beginning dimly to realize that the car of progress would move through
the quiet streets before the decade was over. The smoke of factories was
already succeeding the smoke of the battlefields, and out of the ashes
of a vanquished idealism the spirit of commercial materialism was born.
What was left of the old was fighting valiantly, but hopelessly, against
what had come of the new. The two forces filled the streets of
Dinwiddie. They were embodied in classes, in individuals, in articles of
faith, in ideals of manners. The symbol of the one spirit was the
memorial wreaths on the battlefields; of the other it was the prophetic
smoke of the factories. From where she stood in High Street, she could
see this incense to Mammon rising above the spires of the churches,
above the houses and the hovels, above the charm and the provincialism
which made the Dinwiddie of the eighties. And this charm, as well as
this provincialism, appeared to her to be so inalienable a part of the
old order, with its intrepid faith in itself, with its militant
enthusiasm, with its courageous battle against industrial evolution,
with its strength, its narrowness, its nobility, its blindness, that,
looking ahead, she could discern only the arid stretch of a civilization
from which the last remnant of beauty was banished forever. Already she
felt