His forebears had been officers, judges, and civil servants, men who led disciplined, decently austere lives serving king and state. A certain inner spirituality had manifested itself in the person of the only clergyman amongst them, and a strain of more impetuous, sensual blood had found its way into the family in the previous generation through the writer’s mother, the daughter of a Bohemian bandmaster. She was the source of the foreign racial features in his appearance. It was the union of the father’s sober, conscientious nature with the darker, more fiery impulses of the mother that
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