Meanwhile, Dolores was growing up to woman's estate. And she was
growing into a tall, a graceful, an exquisitely beautiful woman.
Yet in some ways Herminia had reason to be dissatisfied with her
daughter's development. Day by day she watched for signs of the
expected apostolate. Was Dolores pressing forward to the mark for
the prize of her high calling? Her mother half doubted it. Slowly
and regretfully, as the growing girl approached the years when she
might be expected to think for herself, Herminia began to perceive
that the child of so many hopes, of so many aspirations, the child
pre-destined to regenerate humanity, was thinking for herself--in a
retrograde direction. Incredible as it seemed to Herminia, in the
daughter of such a father and such a mother, Dolores' ideas--nay,
worse her ideals--were essentially commonplace. Not that she had
much opportunity of imbibing commonplace opinions from any outside
source; she redeveloped them from within by a pure effort of
atavism. She had reverted to lower types. She had thrown back to
the Philistine.
Heredity of mental and moral qualities is a precarious matter.
These things lie, as it were, on the topmost plane of character;
they smack of the individual, and are therefore far less likely to
persist in offspring than the deeper-seated and better-established
peculiarities of the family, the clan, the race, or the species.
They are idiosyncratic. Indeed, when we remember how greatly the
mental and moral faculties differ from brother to brother, the
product of the same two parental factors, can we wonder that they
differ much more from father to son, the product of one like factor
alone, diluted by the addition of a relatively unknown quality, the
maternal influence? However this may be, at any rate, Dolores
early began to strike out for herself all the most ordinary and
stereotyped opinions of British respectability. It seemed as if
they sprang up in her by unmitigated reversion. She had never
heard in the society of her mother's lodgings any but the freest
and most rational ideas; yet she herself seemed to hark back, of
internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her
remoter ancestry. She showed her individuality only by evolving
for herself all the threadbare platitudes of ordinary convention.
Moreover, it is not parents who have most to do with moulding the
sentiments and opinions of their children. From the beginning,
Dolly thought better of the landlady's views and ideas than of her
mother's. When she went to school, she considered the moral
standpoint of the other girls a great deal more sensible than the
moral standpoint of Herminia's attic. She accepted the beliefs and
opinions of her schoolfellows because they were natural and
congenial to her character. In short, she had what the world calls
common-sense: she revolted from the unpractical Utopianism of her
mother.