Sofia was pardonably puzzled, and looked it.

“I mean, you re-create my vision of the woman I loved and lost—­the woman I saw in her, not the woman she was.”

“Lost?” the girl murmured.

The gray countenance took on an added shade of sombre passion.  “She never understood me, she treated me badly.  Once, in a fit of pique, she ran away.  I did everything—­everything, I tell you!—­to win her back, but—­”

He choked on bitter recollections—­and Sofia was painfully reminded of the Chinese devil-masks in Victor’s study.  But the likeness faded even as she saw it, under her gaze the twisted features were ironed back into their accustomed cast of austerity.

“Before I could persuade her, you were born....  Then she died.”

Sensible though she was of the ellipsis, and afraid it would never be filled in if she interrupted, Sofia could not help uttering a sound of regret and pity for the lot of the mother she had never seen, whose untimely death had ended a life accounted unendurable as Victor’s wife, for reasons unknown but none the less, to the daughter, vaguely and lamentably understandable.

For Sofia by now had passed the stage of pretending to herself that she was not happier away from her father.

Victor mistook the nature of the feeling that swayed the girl—­took to himself the sympathy excited by his revelations.

“But do not grieve on my account.  Is not that which was lost restored again to me?  In you my old love lives once more ... little Sofia!”

He caught and pressed a hand that rested on the cloth between them. (They happened that night to be dining at the Ritz.) And Sofia re-experienced that inevitable, hateful flinching with which she was growing too familiar.

She dropped her head that her eyes might not betray her.

“People will see ...”

“What if they do?  Those who know us will hardly see any wrong in my squeezing the hand of my own daughter; and the others—­not that they matter—­will only think me the luckiest dog alive—­as I am!”

Chuckle and smirk both were indescribably odious, reminding Sofia of the creature Sturm; he had a laugh like that for her, on the rare occasion when chance propinquity encouraged the Boche to begin one of his uncouth essays in flirtation.

Sturm’s attitude, in truth, perplexed Sofia to exasperation; that is to say, as much as it offended her.  For Victor the man seemed to entertain an exaggerated yet deeply rooted respect, approaching actual awe, which he tried his best to carry off with a swagger; for to hold anybody in any degree of deference was, one judged, somehow deplorable, even shameful, in the code of Sturm; but in Victor’s presence the fellow’s bravado would quickly wilt into hopeless servility, he would cringe and crawl like a dog currying the favour of a harsh master.

Nevertheless, Victor’s daughter seemed to be no more than fair game, in Sturm’s understanding, and a source of supercilious amusement but thinly veiled or not at all.  Alone with the girl, Sturm put on the airs of a Prussianized pasha condescending to a new odalisque.