Page 254 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

CHAPTER SEVEN

T WAS part of what Decoud would have called his sane
Imaterialism that he did not believe in the possibility of
friendship between man and woman.
The one exception he allowed confirmed, he maintained,
that absolute rule. Friendship was possible between brother
and sister, meaning by friendship the frank unreserve, as
before another human being, of thoughts and sensations;
all the objectless and necessary sincerity of one’s innermost
life trying to re-act upon the profound sympathies of an-
other existence.
His favourite sister, the handsome, slightly arbitrary and
resolute angel, ruling the father and mother Decoud in the
first-floor apartments of a very fine Parisian house, was the
recipient of Martin Decoud’s confidences as to his thoughts,
actions, purposes, doubts, and even failures….
‘Prepare our little circle in Paris for the birth of another
South American Republic. One more or less, what does it
matter? They may come into the world like evil flowers on
a hotbed of rotten institutions; but the seed of this one has
germinated in your brother’s brain, and that will be enough
for your devoted assent. I am writing this to you by the light
of a single candle, in a sort of inn, near the harbour, kept by
an Italian called Viola, a protege of Mrs. Gould. The whole
building, which, for all I know, may have been contrived by