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.
Sofia held the animal in a deadly loathing which, betrayed in word or look or gesture, animated in him only a spirit of derision. In the absence of Victor, Sturm’s eyes were ever ironic, his bows and leers mocking, his speeches flavoured with clumsy sarcasm; from which it resulted that the girl never quite forgot the impression which he had managed to convey in those few moments of their first encounter, that Sturm knew something she ought to know but didn’t, and was meanly jeering at her in his sleeve.
What virtues Victor Vassilyevski perceived in the man passed comprehension. But so did most of Victor’s whims and ways. What riddle more obscure than that portentous business which permeated the atmosphere of the establishment with the taint of stealth and terror?—the famous “research work” that kept Victor closeted with Sturm in his study daily for hours at a time, often in confabulation with others of like ilk, men of furtive and unprepossessing cast who came and went by appointment at all hours, but as a rule late at night!
Into these conferences, Sofia observed, Karslake was never summoned. She wondered why. He was, as she saw him, so unquestionably the better man, everything that Sturm was not, open of countenance, fair of temper and tongue, well-bred and well-mannered, light of heart and high spirited, and at the same time dependable, with metal of sincerity and earnestness like tempered steel in his character—or Sofia misread him woefully.