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 position as reverently as if it were a plate in church, had never spoken a profane word or recognized a joke in his life, and still dined at two o’clock in the afternoon because his grandfather, who was dyspeptic by constitution, had been unable to digest a late dinner.  At the time of his marriage, an unusually happy one, he was regarded as “the handsomest man of his day”; and he was still yearned over from a distance by elderly ladies of suppressed romantic temperaments.

Mrs. Culpeper, a small imperious woman of distinguished lineage and uncertain temper, had gone through an entire life seeing only one thing at a time, and never seeing that one thing as it really was.  If her husband embodied the moral purpose, she herself was an incarnation of the evasive idealism of the nineteenth century.  Her universe was comprised in her family circle; her horizon ended with the old brick wall between the alley and the Culpepers’ garden.  All that related to her husband, her eight children and her six grandchildren, was not only of supreme importance and intense interest to her, but of unsurpassed beauty and excellence.  It was intolerable to her exclusive maternal instinct that either virtue or happiness should exist in any degree, except a lesser measure, outside of her own household; and praise of another woman’s children conveyed to her a secret disparagement of her own.  Having naturally a kind heart she could forgive any sin in her neighbours