ink into an old shipping society, the Baltimore that ruled the
Chesapeake had no more perfected product than Mrs. Custis.

Her modesty and virtue were as natural as her prejudices; she believed
that marriage was the close of female ambition, and marrying her
children was the only innovation to be permitted. Certain
accomplishments she thought due to woman, but none of them must become
masculine in prosecution; a professional woman she shrank from as from
an infidel or an abolitionist; reading was meritorious up to an orthodox
point, but a passion for new books was dangerous, probably irreligious.
To lose one's money was a crime; to lose another's money the unforgiven
sin, because that was Baltimore public opinion, which she thought was
the only opinion entitled to consideration. The old Scotch and Irish
merchants there had made it the law that enterprise was only excusable
by success, and that success only branded an innovator. A good standard
of society, therefore, had barely permitted Judge Custis to take up the
bog-ore manufacture, and, failing in it, his wife thought he was no
better than a Jacobin.

On the Eastern Shore, where society was formed before Glasgow and
Belfast had colonized upon the Chesapeake with their precise formulas of
life, a gentler benevolence rose and descended upon the ground every
day, like the evaporations of those prolific seas which manure the thin
soil unfailingly. Religion and benevolence were depositions rather than
dogmas there; moderate poverty was the not unwelcome expectation, wealth
a subject of apprehensive scruples, kindness the law, pride the
exception, and grinding avarice, like Meshach Milburn's, was the mark of
the devil entering into the neighbor and the fellow-man.

Judge Custis was representative of his neighbors except in his Virginia
voluptuousness; his neighbors were neither prudes nor hypocrites, and he
respected them more than the arrogant race in the old land of Accomac
and in the Virginia peninsulas, whose traits he had almost lost.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the last of the cavalier stock was his
daughter, Vesta. From him it had nearly departed, and his sense of moral
shortcomings expanded his heart and made him tenderly pious to his kind,
if not to God. He admired new-comers, new business modes, and Northern
intruders and ideas, feeling that perhaps the last evidence of his
aristocracy from nature was a chivalric resignation. The pine-trees were
saying to h