The thing was done, and she was back in her accustomed attitude, before my mind had received intelligence of the caress; and when I turned to look her in the face I could perceive no answerable sentiment.

It was plain she attached no moment to the act, and I blamed myself for my own more uneasy consciousness.
The sight and (if I may so call it) the acquaintance of the mother confirmed the view I had already taken of the son.

The family blood had been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a common error among the proud and the exclusive.

No decline, indeed, was to be traced in the body, which had been handed down unimpaired in shapeliness and strength; and the faces of to-day were struck as sharply from the mint, as the face of two centuries ago that smiled upon me from the portrait.

But the intelligence (that more precious heirloom) was degenerate; the treasure of ancestral memory ran low; and it had required the potent, plebeian crossing of a muleteer or mountain contrabandista to raise, what approached hebetude in the mother, into the active oddity of the son.