Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 6. CHAPTER SIX (continued)

"My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here." These few
words made her pause as if they had been a sudden revelation.
Perhaps the mere fact of being born in the country did make a
difference. She had a great confidence in her husband; it had
always been very great. He had struck her imagination from the
first by his unsentimentalism, by that very quietude of mind
which she had erected in her thought for a sign of perfect
competency in the business of living. Don Jose Avellanos, their
neighbour across the street, a statesman, a poet, a man of
culture, who had represented his country at several European
Courts (and had suffered untold indignities as a state prisoner
in the time of the tyrant Guzman Bento), used to declare in Dona
Emilia's drawing-room that Carlos had all the English qualities
of character with a truly patriotic heart.

Mrs. Gould, raising her eyes to her husband's thin, red and tan
face, could not detect the slightest quiver of a feature at what
he must have heard said of his patriotism. Perhaps he had just
dismounted on his return from the mine; he was English enough to
disregard the hottest hours of the day. Basilio, in a livery of
white linen and a red sash, had squatted for a moment behind his
heels to unstrap the heavy, blunt spurs in the patio; and then
the Senor Administrator would go up the staircase into the
gallery. Rows of plants in pots, ranged on the balustrade between
the pilasters of the arches, screened the corredor with their
leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below, whose paved space
is the true hearthstone of a South American house, where the
quiet hours of domestic life are marked by the shifting of light
and shadow on the flagstones.

Senor Avellanos was in the habit of crossing the patio at five
o'clock almost every day. Don Jose chose to come over at tea-time
because the English rite at Dona Emilia's house reminded him of
the time he lived in London as Minister Plenipotentiary to the
Court of St. James. He did not like tea; and, usually, rocking
his American chair, his neat little shiny boots crossed on the
foot-rest, he would talk on and on with a sort of complacent
virtuosity wonderful in a man of his age, while he held the cup
in his hands for a long time. His close-cropped head was
perfectly white; his eyes coalblack.