Mrs. Custis had no insight nor variability of charity; her mind, bounded
by the municipal republic of Baltimore, which esteems itself the world,
particularly among its mercantile aristocracy, who live like the old
Venetian nobility among their flat lagoons, and do commerce chiefly with
the Turk in the more torrid and instinctive Indies and South. Amiable,
social, afraid of new ideas, frugal of money; if hospitable at the
table, with a certain spiritedness that is seldom intellectual, but a
beauty that powerfully attracts, till, by the limited sympathies beneath
it, the husband from the outer world discerns how hopelessly slavery and
caste sink 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.
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