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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: 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
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