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.