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.