Sofia knew why.  If she hadn’t, the mirror across the room would have enlightened even a woman without vanity; which paradox this thoroughly human young person was not.

She was, indeed, healthily vain; and when she wasn’t focussing dream-dark eyes upon the windows, or verifying additions and making change, she was as likely as not to be stealing consultations with the mirror opposite, making sure she hadn’t, in the last few minutes, gone off in her looks.  Not that her comeliness bade fair ever to prove the cause of any real excitement.  Mama Therese made a first-rate dragon:  she was very much on the job of discouraging enterprising young men, and this without respect for union hours or overtime.  And when she wasn’t functioning as the ubiquitous wet-blanket, Papa Dupont understudied for her, and did it most efficiently, too.  If anything he was more vigilant and enthusiastic when it came to administering the snub sufficient than even Mama Therese; in Sofia’s sight, indeed, he betrayed some personal feeling in the business; he seemed to consider alien admiration of his charge an encroachment upon his private prerogatives, to be resented accordingly.

Sofia understood.  At eighteen—­thanks to the comprehensive visual education in the business of life which she could hardly have failed to assimilate from a coign of vantage overlooking every table of a Soho restaurant—­there were precious few things she didn’t understand.  But her insight into Papa Dupont’s mind in respect of herself was wholly devoid of sympathy.  She was just a little bit afraid of him, and she despised him without measure.  And this contempt was founded on something more than his weakness for taking numerous and surreptitious nips (surreptitious, at least, until they became numerous) while presiding over the zinc in the pantry between the restaurant proper and the kitchen; and on something more than his reluctance to let Mama Therese make an honest man of him, although these two had squabbled openly for so many years that most of the house staff believed them to be married hard and fast enough.

For the matter of that, Sofia herself might have been the dupe of this popular delusion—­which Mama Therese did her best to encourage by never referring to Dupont save as “mon mari”—­had they been less imprudent in recriminations which had passed between them in private when Sofia was of an age so tender that she was presumed to be safely immature of mind.  Whereas she had always been precocious, if rather a self-contained child.  Almost from infancy she had been conversant with many things which she knew it wouldn’t do to talk about.

Such sympathy as Sofia wasted on the couple was all for Mama Therese.  What with keeping an eye on Papa Dupont that prevented his drinking himself to death seven times per calendar week, and an eye on Sofia that was fondly credited with being largely responsible for her failure to run away with each and every presentable man who ogled her, and browbeating the waiters and frustrating their attempts to cheat the house out of its fair dues, and supervising the marketing and the cuisine:  believe it or not, Mama Therese led a tolerably busy life and deserved whatever gratification she got out of it, to say nothing of highest commendation for industry, fidelity, and frugality.  But that did nothing to prevent Sofia from not liking her.