Page 210 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

and all his Negro Liberals hanging on to his gold-laced
sleeve? He ought to have been bought off with his own
stupid weight of gold—his weight of gold, I tell you, boots,
sabre, spurs, cocked hat, and all.’
She shook her head slightly. ‘It was impossible,’ she mur-
mured.
‘He wanted the whole lot? What?’
She was facing him now in the deep recess of the window,
very close and motionless. Her lips moved rapidly. Decoud,
leaning his back against the wall, listened with crossed
arms and lowered eyelids. He drank the tones of her even
voice, and watched the agitated life of her throat, as if waves
of emotion had run from her heart to pass out into the air in
her reasonable words. He also had his aspirations, he aspired
to carry her away out of these deadly futilities of pronuncia-
mientos and reforms. All this was wrong—utterly wrong;
but she fascinated him, and sometimes the sheer sagacity of
a phrase would break the charm, replace the fascination by
a sudden unwilling thrill of interest. Some women hovered,
as it were, on the threshold of genius, he reflected. They did
not want to know, or think, or understand. Passion stood
for all that, and he was ready to believe that some startlingly
profound remark, some appreciation of character, or a judg-
ment upon an event, bordered on the miraculous. In the
mature Antonia he could see with an extraordinary vivid-
ness the austere schoolgirl of the earlier days. She seduced
his attention; sometimes he could not restrain a murmur of
assent; now and then he advanced an objection quite seri-
ously. Gradually they began to argue; the curtain half hid

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