Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 11. CHAPTER ELEVEN (continued)

The word "incorrigible"--a word lately pronounced by Dr.
Monygham--floated into her still and sad immobility.
Incorrigible in his devotion to the great silver mine was the
Senor Administrador! Incorrigible in his hard, determined service
of the material interests to which he had pinned his faith in the
triumph of order and justice. Poor boy! She had a clear vision of
the grey hairs on his temples. He was perfect--perfect. What
more could she have expected? It was a colossal and lasting
success; and love was only a short moment of forgetfulness, a
short intoxication, whose delight one remembered with a sense of
sadness, as if it had been a deep grief lived through. There was
something inherent in the necessities of successful action which
carried with it the moral degradation of the idea. She saw the
San Tome mountain hanging over the Campo, over the whole land,
feared, hated, wealthy; more soulless than any tyrant, more
pitiless and autocratic than the worst Government; ready to crush
innumerable lives in the expansion of its greatness. He did not
see it. He could not see it. It was not his fault. He was
perfect, perfect; but she would never have him to herself. Never;
not for one short hour altogether to herself in this old Spanish
house she loved so well! Incorrigible, the last of the Corbelans,
the last of the Avellanos, the doctor had said; but she saw
clearly the San Tome mine possessing, consuming, burning up the
life of the last of the Costaguana Goulds; mastering the
energetic spirit of the son as it had mastered the lamentable
weakness of the father. A terrible success for the last of the
Goulds. The last! She had hoped for a long, long time, that
perhaps----But no! There were to be no more. An immense
desolation, the dread of her own continued life, descended upon
the first lady of Sulaco. With a prophetic vision she saw herself
surviving alone the degradation of her young ideal of life, of
love, of work--all alone in the Treasure House of the World. The
profound, blind, suffering expression of a painful dream settled
on her face with its closed eyes. In the indistinct voice of an
unlucky sleeper. lying passive in the grip of a merciless
nightmare, she stammered out aimlessly the words--

"Material interest."