Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
undertone. "And when we arrived here at last I don't know what we should have done without your hospitality. What an out-of-the-way place Sulaco is!—and for a harbor, too! Astonishing!"
"Ah, but we are very proud of it. It used to be historically important. The highest ecclesiastical court for two viceroyalties sat here in the olden time," she instructed him with animation.
"I am impressed. I didn't mean to be disparaging. You seem very patriotic."
"The place is lovable, if only by its situation. Perhaps you don't know what an old resident I am."
"How old, I wonder," he murmured, looking at her with a slight smile. Mrs. Gould's appearance was made youthful by the mobile intelligence of her face. "We can't give you your ecclesiastical court back again; but you shall have more steamers, a railway, a telegraph-cable—a future in the great world which is worth infinitely more than any amount of ecclesiastical past. You shall be brought in touch with something greater than two viceroyalties. But I had no notion that a place on a sea-coast could remain so isolated from the world. If it had been a thousand miles inland now—most remarkable! Has anything ever happened here for a hundred years before to-day?"
While he talked in a slow, humorous tone, she kept her little smile. Abounding ironically in his sense, she assured him that certainly not—nothing ever happened in Sulaco. Even the revolutions, of which there had been two in her time, had respected the repose of the place. Their course ran in the more
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