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!”