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.