"Patrician descent be hanged! Who doubts that your lordlings may
have their 'distinctive cast of form and features' as much as we
----shire tradesmen have ours? But which is the best? Not theirs
assuredly. As to their women, it is a little different: they
cultivate beauty from childhood upwards, and may by care and
training attain to a certain degree of excellence in that point,
just like the oriental odalisques. Yet even this superiority is
doubtful. Compare the figure in that frame with Mrs. Edward
Crimsworth--which is the finer animal?"

I replied quietly: "Compare yourself and Mr. Edward Crimsworth,
Mr Hunsden."

"Oh, Crimsworth is better filled up than I am, I know besides he
has a straight nose, arched eyebrows, and all that; but these
advantages--if they are advantages--he did not inherit from his
mother, the patrician, but from his father, old Crimsworth, who,
MY father says, was as veritable a ----shire blue-dyer as ever
put indigo in a vat yet withal the handsomest man in the three
Ridings. It is you, William, who are the aristocrat of your
family, and you are not as fine a fellow as your plebeian brother
by long chalk."

There was something in Mr. Hunsden's point-blank mode of speech
which rather pleased me than otherwise because it set me at my
ease. I continued the conversation with a degree of interest.

"How do you happen to know that I am Mr. Crimsworth's brother? I
thought you and everybody else looked upon me only in the light
of a poor clerk."