Quotation from: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

Written by: Joseph Conrad


She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in Sulaco)
open for the dispensation of the small graces of existence. She
dispensed them with simplicity and charm because she was guided by an
alert perception of values. She was highly gifted in the art of human
intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and
in the suggestion of universal comprehension. Charles Gould (the Gould
family, established in Costaguana for three generations, always went to
England for their education and for their wives) imagined that he had
fallen in love with a girl's sound common sense like any other man,
but these were not exactly the reasons why, for instance, the whole
surveying camp, from the youngest of the young men to their mature
chief, should have found occasion to allude to Mrs. Gould's house
so frequently amongst the high peaks of the Sierra. She would have
protested that she had done nothing for them, with a low laugh and
a surprised widening of her grey eyes, had anybody told her how
convincingly she was remembered on the edge of the snow-line above
Sulaco. But directly, with a little capable air of setting her wits to
work, she would have found an explanation. "Of course, it was such a
surprise for these boys to find any sort of welcome here. And I suppose
they are homesick. I suppose everybody must be always just a little
homesick."

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