| During
my long and intimate acquaintance with Mr. Sherlock Holmes I had never heard him
refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his own early life. This reticence
upon his part had increased the somewhat inhuman effect which he produced upon
me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a
brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in
intelligence. His aversion to women and his disinclination to form new friendships
were both typical of his unemotional character, but not more so than his complete
suppression of every reference to his own people. I had come to believe that he
was an orphan with no relatives living; but one day. to my very great surprise,
he began to talk to me about his brother. It
was after tea on a summer evening, and the conversation, which had roamed in a
desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the change in the
obliquity of the ecliptic,
came round at last to the question of atavism and
hereditary aptitudes. The point under discussion was, how far any singular gift
in an individual was due to his ancestry and how far to his own early training. "In
your own case," said I, "from all that you have told me, it seems obvious
that your faculty of observation and your peculiar facility for deduction are
due to your own systematic
training." "To
some extent," he answered thoughtfully. "My ancestors were country squires,
who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class. But, none
the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother,
who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to
take the strangest forms."
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