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