dable.

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!"

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.