Blood: A Story of Two Brothers

A certain titled lady, great in the social world, was walking down the
village street between two ladies of the village, and their
conversation was about some person known to the two who had behaved in
the noblest manner in difficult circumstances, and the talk ran on
between the two like a duet, the great lady mostly silent and paying
but little attention to it. At length the subject was exhausted, and as
a proper conclusion to round the discourse off, one of them remarked:
"It is what I have always said,--there's nothing like blood!" Whereupon
the great person returned, "I don't agree with you: it strikes me you
two are always praising blood, and I think it perfectly horrid. The
very sight of a black pudding for instance turns me sick and makes me
want to be a vegetarian."

The others smiled and laboriously explained that they were not praising
blood as an article of diet, but had used the word in its other and
partly metamorphical sense. They simply meant that as a rule persons of
good blood or of old families had better qualities and a higher
standard of conduct and action than others.

The other listened and said nothing, for although of good blood herself
she was an out-and-out democrat, a burning Radical, burning bright in
the forests of the night of dark old England, and she considered that
all these lofty notions about old families and higher standards were
confined to those who knew little or nothing about the life of the
upper classes.

She, the aristocrat, was wrong, and the two village ladies, members of
the middle class, were right, although they were without a sense of
humour and did not know that their distinguished friend was poking a
little fun at them when she spoke about black puddings.

They were right, and it was never necessary for Herbert Spencer to tell
us that the world is right in looking for nobler motives and ideals, a
higher standard of conduct, better, sweeter manners, from those who are
highly placed than from the ruck of men; and as this higher, better
life, which is only possible in the leisured classes, is correlated
with the "aspects which please," the regular features and personal
beauty, the conclusion is the beauty and goodness or "inward
perfections" are correlated.

All this is common, universal knowledge: to all men of all races and in
all parts of the world it comes as a shock to hear that a person of a
noble countenance has been guilty of an ignoble action. It is only the
ugly (and bad) who fondly cherish the delusion that beauty doesn't
matter, that it is only skin-deep and the rest of it.

Here now arises a curious question, the subject of this little paper.
When a good old family, of good