Patty's whole education tended to foster her pride, and in Patty's circumstances pride was conservative; it saved her from possible assimilation with the vulgarity about her. She was a lily among hollyhocks. Her mother had come of an "old family"--in truth, of two or three old families. All of them had considered that attachment to the Established Church was part and parcel of their gentility, and most of them had been staunch Tories in the Revolution. Patty had inherited from her mother refinement, pride, and a certain lofty inflexibility of disposition. In this congenial soil Mrs. Lumsden had planted traditional prejudices. Patty read her Prayer-book, and wished that she might once attend the stately Episcopal service; she disliked the lowness of all the sects: the sing-song of the Baptist preacher and the rant of the Methodist itinerant were equally distasteful. She had never seen a clergyman in robes, but she tried, from her mother's descriptions, to form a mental picture of the long-drawn dignity of the service in an Old Virginia country church. Patty was imaginative, like most girls of her age; but her ideals were ruled by the pride in which she had been cradled. For the Methodists she entertained a peculiar aversion. Methodism was new, and, like everything new, lacked traditions, picturesqueness, mustiness, and all the other essentials of gentility in religious matters. The converts were rude, vulgar, and poor; the preachers were illiterate, and often rough in voice and speech; they made war on dancing and jewelry, and dancing and jewelry appertained to good-breeding. Ever since her father had been taken with that strange disorder called "the jerks," she had hated the Methodists worse than ever. They had made a direct attack on her pride.