memory of box and mint and blush roses stole into the senses. It was
then that one turned to the Doric columns of the Culpeper house,
standing firmly established in its grassy lawn above the street and the
age, and reflected that the defeated spirit of tradition had entrenched
itself well at the last. Time had been powerless against that fortress
of prejudice; against that cheerful and inaccessible prison of the
tribal instinct. Poverty, the one indiscriminate leveller of men and
principles, had never attacked it, for in the lean years of
Reconstruction, when to look well fed was little short of a disgrace in
Virginia, an English cousin, remote but clannish, had died at an
opportune moment and left Mr. Randolph Byrd Culpeper a moderate fortune.
Thanks to this event, which Mrs. Culpeper 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,