Quotation from: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

Written by: Joseph Conrad


Decoud and Antonia remained leaning over the balcony, side by side,
touching elbows, with their heads overhanging the darkness of the
street, and the brilliantly lighted sala at their backs. This was a
tete-a-tete of extreme impropriety; something of which in the whole
extent of the Republic only the extraordinary Antonia could be
capable--the poor, motherless girl, never accompanied, with a careless
father, who had thought only of making her learned. Even Decoud himself
seemed to feel that this was as much as he could expect of having her to
himself till--till the revolution was over and he could carry her off
to Europe, away from the endlessness of civil strife, whose folly seemed
even harder to bear than its ignominy. After one Montero there would
be another, the lawlessness of a populace of all colours and races,
barbarism, irremediable tyranny. As the great Liberator Bolivar had said
in the bitterness of his spirit, "America is ungovernable. Those who
worked for her independence have ploughed the sea." He did not care, he
declared boldly; he seized every opportunity to tell her that though she
had managed to make a Blanco journalist of him, he was no patriot. First
of all, the word had no sense for cultured minds, to whom the narrowness
of every belief is odious; and secondly, in connection with the
everlasting troubles of this unhappy country it was hopelessly
besmirched; it had been the cry of dark barbarism, the cloak of
lawlessness, of crimes, of rapacity, of simple thieving.

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