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.




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