Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
with her so completely in all their intercourse of small encounters; but even before she had time to turn towards him, which she did slowly with a rigid grace, he had begun to plead:
"My sister is only waiting to embrace you. My father is transported. I won't say anything of my mother! Our mothers were like sisters. There is the mail-boat for the south next week—let us go. That Moraga is a fool! A man like Montero is bribed. It's the practice of the country. It's tradition—it's politics. Read Fifty Years of Misrule."
"Leave poor papa alone, Don Martin. He believes—"
"I have the greatest tenderness for your father," he began, hurriedly. "But I love you, Antonia! And Moraga has miserably mismanaged this business. Perhaps your father did, too; I don't know. Montero was bribeable. Why, I suppose he only wanted his share of this famous loan for national development. Why didn't the stupid Sta. Marta people give him a mission to Eruope, or something? He would have taken five years' salary in advance, and go on loafing in Paris, this stupid, ferocious Indio!"
"The man," she said, thoughtfully, and very calm before this outburst, "was intoxicated with vanity. We had all the information, not from Moraga only; from others, too. There was his brother intriguing, too."
"Oh yes!" he said. "Of course you know. You know everything. You read all the correspondence, you write all the papers—all those state papers that are inspired here, in this room, in blind deference to a
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