"Take away the horse and do you know what's left?" challenges the president of the Middleburg National Bank, Mr. Horses outnumber people in Middleburg just as they do in Outer Mongolia, and the minority wouldn't upset the imbalance for the world. He means that in Middleburg and the surrounding pastoral countryside of Loudoun and Fauquier counties, it is perfectly ordinary to be named Mellon, Phipps, Iselin, Du Pont or Jack Kennedy, and that it is downright commonplace to think and to talk about the horse most of the livelong day. "Oh, sure, I suppose we live in a rather unusual community," says a longtime resident, "but really, all things considered, we're pretty ordinary people." Forty miles west of Washington, this is the stratified, socially correct home of the red fox, the pedigreed horse, the pedigreed hound and the pedigreed person. Greer's sells a nice little porcelain figure of a jockey on a Thoroughbred with his silks colored to your liking for $525), and it has an inn with a French chef (who cooked a saucy dinner recently when Hodding Carter's son married the daughter of the State Department's George McGhee), the editorial offices of a nationally and fashionably circulated horse magazine, a liquor store that is awash with a vast, nonrural inventory of highfalutin imported booze and last year did a $400,000 business, Foxcroft, the horsy girls' school, and a half-million-dollar community center where farmers and their wives go bowling, ladies and gentlemen attend black-tie hunt balls and the President of the U.S. This same tiny village is also chockablock with interior decorating and antique shops (Mrs.
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