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.
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