Sofia, indeed, was often puzzled to account for what to her appeared to be an almost pathetic eagerness on the part of Victor, in strange accord with his lofty pretensions, to claim acquaintanceship with and win the recognition even of persons of the utmost inconsequence.  And she remarked, too, that his temper was apt to be raw in sequel to their excursions into the haunts of the well-known.  But it was for other reasons altogether that she came to dread them most.

For one thing, Victor’s conversation was ordinarily rather dull; at best, the reverse of exhilarating.  And in spite of her unquestioning acceptance of him as her father, he remained to Sofia actually a new acquaintance; in effect, a strange man.  And from strangers, more than from relatives with whose minds one is presumably on terms of close intimacy, one is warranted in expecting something in the way of mutual stimulation through the opening of new perspectives of experience, thought, and feeling.  Whereas—­with Sofia, at least—­Victor seemed unable to talk on more than two subjects, one or the other of which was constantly uppermost in his thoughts.

He never wearied of warning Sofia against the dangers of those moral infirmities which he asserted were hers by legitimate inheritance; and which, if Victor were right in his contentions, she could hardly hope to overcome without a desperate struggle.  She would have to be forever on guard, he insisted, lest the temptation of some moment, not to be foreseen, prove too strong for her latent weakness of character, and commit her, through some unpremeditated act of defiance to the law—­most probably an act of theft—­to the life of a social outcast.

To do her justice, the girl was consciously not much impressed by this alleged peril.  She had never been aware of any failing such as Victor would have endowed her with; so far as she could remember she had never been tempted to commit more venial sins than inhered in lying to Mama Therese now and then in order to escape unmerited disciplining at the heavy hands of that industrious virago; and as for thieving, the very thought of anything of that sort was detestable to Sofia.

But unconsciously, no doubt, the everlasting iteration of Victor’s admonitions had its purposed effect upon that sensitive and impressionable spirit.

Then, too, by degrees, but all too soon, it became manifest that the memory of his passionate attachment for her mother possessed Victor to the point of monomania.  It was only with an effort that he could force himself to talk to Sofia on other subjects.  He thought of nothing else while with her; if she read his eyes aright, often glimpses of weird light flickering in their opaque depths, like heat lightning of a murky summer’s night, fairly frightened her, and she knew a shuddering perception of the possibility that Victor was at times in danger of confusing the daughter with the mother.

“Never was there such resemblance,” he once uttered, in a stare.  “You are more like her than she herself!”