Before you were born, in the daytime and in the stillness of the night your mother heard it week after week.

Perhaps even when she was asleep the sound rippled through her dreams.

Thus you came by it.

It was born in you." "Yes," she answered, following his argument step by step very carefully, but without a sign of the perplexity which was evident in Hilary Chayne.
Chayne stood a little aloof, looking from Sylvia's face to the face of her father, in doubt whither the talk was leading.

Sylvia, on the other hand, recognized each sentence which her father spoke as the embodiment of a thought with which she was herself familiar.
"Well, then, here's a definite thing, an influence most likely, a characteristic most certainly, and not of your making! One out of how many influences, characteristics which are part of you but not of your making! But we can lay our finger on it.