“Think a moment. It might be wiser not to go. You alone can say.”
“I don’t quite understand ...”
Victor sighed. “It is a painful subject,” he said, slowly—“one I hesitate to reopen. But we can never profit by closing our minds to facts; I mean, to the reality of the danger which is always with us, since it is within us.”
“What danger?” Sofia enquired, sullenly, knowing the answer too well before it was spoken.
“The danger of sudden temptation to indulge the lawless appetites with which heredity has endued us—me from the nameless forebears whom I never knew, you directly from parents both of whom boasted criminal records.”
“I don’t believe it!” Sofia declared, passionately—“I can’t believe it, I won’t! Even if you are—”
She was going on to say “if you are my father,” but caught herself in time. Had not Karslake warned her in his note: “Your only safety now lies in his continuing to believe that you are unsuspicious.” She continued in a tempest of expostulation whose fury covered her break:
“Even if you were once a thief and my mother—my mother!—everything vile, as you persist in trying to make me believe—God knows why!—it is possible I may still have failed to inherit your criminal tendencies; and not only possible, but true, if I know myself at all. For I have never felt the temptation to steal that you insist I must have inherited from you—nor any other inclination toward things as mean, contemptible, and dishonourable as they are dishonest!”
With only his slow, forbearing smile by way of comment, Victor heard her out, but when she paused to reassort her thoughts, lifted a temporizing hand.
“Not yet, perhaps,” he said, gently. “There is always the first time with every rebel against man-made laws. But, where the predisposition so indubitably exists, it is inevitable, soon or late it must come to you, my dear—the time when the will is too weak, temptation too strong. Against it we must be forever on our guard.”