Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
with a gloomy and hopeless fervor which had no time to surprise Dr. Monygham before, reverting to their previous conversation, he continued in a sinister tone, "Si, Señor Doctor. As you were saying, it is my own affair. A very desperate affair."
"There are no two men in this part of the world that could have saved themselves by swimming, as you have done," the doctor said, admiringly.
And again there was silence between those two men. They were both reflecting, and the diversity of their natures made their thoughts, born from their meeting, swing afar from each other. The doctor, impelled to risky action by his loyalty to the Goulds, wondered with thankfulness at the chain of accident which had brought that man back where he would be of the greatest use in the work of saving the San Tomé mine. The doctor was loyal to the mine. It presented itself to his fifty-years-old eyes in the shape of a little woman in a soft dress with a long train, with a head attractively overweighted by a great mass of fair hair, and the delicate preciousness of her inner worth, partaking of a gem and a flower, revealed in every attitude of her person. As the dangers thickened round the San Tomé mine, this illusion acquired force, ermanency, and authority. It claimed him at last! This claim, exalted by a spiritual detachment from the usual sanctions of hope and reward, made Dr. Monygham's thinking, acting individuality extremely dangerous to himself and to others, all his scruples vanishing in the proud feeling that his devotion was the only thing that stood between an admirable woman and a frightful disaster.
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