Jack was amazed and disheartened at what he saw and heard.  The activity, resources, gayety, and confidence of the authorities and people, recalled to his mind, Oxford, the jocund capital of Charles II and the royalists, while the Commonwealth leaders were drilling their armies.  But instead of the chaos of rapine, the wanton excesses, the pillage of churches and colleges that marked the tenure of the miserable Charles, Richmond was as orderly, serene, the Congress as deliberate, and the people as content, as the Rome of the conquest of Persia or France after Jemmapes.  The army was hot for battle, and as confident of the result as the Guard at Austerlitz or McClellan at Malvern.  The work done and the way of its doing showed that the populace, as well as the rulers, were convinced of the destiny of the city to be henceforth mistress of herself, the preordained metropolis of half the continent—­perhaps the whole continent—­for, would the North be able to resist joining States with a destiny so glorious—­a regal republic where birth and rank were tacitly enthroned?  The city’s greatness was taken by the mass, as a matter of course—­like an heir in chancery who has won all but the final decree in the suit, or like a great nobleman who has come to his inheritance.

Though it was the first week of November when the Atterburys found home affairs going on smoothly in the town-house, summer still disputed with winter the short lovely days of fall, as Jack described the lingering May-day mildness of this seductive Southern autumn.  It was the first season he had ever spent south of New York, and, like most Americans, he realized, with wonder, that the wind which brought ice and snow to New York, visited lower Virginia with only a sharp evening and morning reminder that summer was gone.  The balm and beauty of the climate came with something of healing to the hurt his heart and hope had suffered at Rosedale.  If anything could have mitigated the pangs of a young warrior perplexed in love and held in leash in war, it was such an existence as the Atterburys inveigled him into leading.  The part of carpet-knight is not difficult to learn, and the awkwardness of it is to some extent atoned for when the service is constrained.  At least Jack took this philosophical view of it, and soon gave himself up to the merry social life of his surroundings with an animation that led his hosts to hope that he might be won over to the Confederate cause.  Very young men do not sorrow long or deeply, and Jack was young.  He was neither reckless nor trifling, but I am sure that none of the adulating groups that made much of the handsome Yankee in Richmond that season would have suspected that the young man looked in his mirror night and morning, frowned darkly at the reflected image he saw there, and said, solemnly, “You are a murderer!” It was by no means a tragic accent in which this thrilling apostrophe was spoken.  It was very much in the tone that a woman employs when she looks hastily in the mirror and utters a soft “What a fright I am!” apparently receiving comforting contradiction enough from the mirror to make the remark worth frequent repetition.