peper gratefully classified as the
"intervention of Providence," the family had scarcely altered its manner
of living in the last two hundred years. To be sure there were modern
discomforts which related to the abolition of slavery and the
prohibition of whiskey; but since the Culpepers had been indulgent
masters and light drinkers, they had come to regard these deprivations
as in the nature of blessings. Solid, imposing, and as richly endowed as
an institution of learning, the Culpeper generations had weathered both
the restraints and the assaults of the centuries. The need to make a
living, that grim necessity which is the mother of democracy, had
brushed them as lightly as the theory of evolution. Saturated with
tradition as with an odour, and fortified by the ponderous moral purpose
of the Victorian age, they had never doubted anything that was old and
never discovered anything that was new. About them as about the hidden
village, there was the charm of mellowness, of unruffled serenity. Some
ineradicable belief in things as they have always been had preserved
them from the aesthetic derangement of the Mid-Victorian taste; and in
standing for what was old, they had stood, inadvertently but
courageously, for what was excellent. Security, permanence,
possession--all the instincts which blend to make the tribe and the
community, all the agencies which work for organized society and against
the wayward experiment in human destiny--these were the stubborn forces
embodied in the Culpeper stock.

The present head of the family, that Randolph Byrd Culpeper who had been
only ten years old when Providence intervened, was now a fine-looking,
heavily built man of sixty-five, with prominent dark eyes under sleepy
lids, abundant iron-gray hair which was brushed until it shone, and a
drooping moustache that was still as brown as it had been in his youth.
He had an impressive though stolid bearing, an amiable expression, an
engaging smile, and the manner of a weary monarch. It was his boast that
he had never done anything for the first time without ascertaining
precisely how it had been done by the highest authority before him.
Devoid of even the rudiments of an imagination, he had never been
visited in a nightmare by the suspicion that the name of Culpeper was
not the best result of the best of all possible worlds. As long as his
prejudices were not offended his generosity was inexhaustible. For the
rest, he bore his social positi