Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART SECOND: THE ISABELS 2. CHAPTER TWO (continued)

Whenever possible Antonia attended her father; her recognized
devotion weakened the shocking effect of her scorn for the rigid
conventions regulating the life of Spanish-American girlhood.
And, in truth, she was no longer girlish. It was said that she
often wrote State papers from her father's dictation, and was
allowed to read all the books in his library. At the receptions--
where the situation was saved by the presence of a very decrepit
old lady (a relation of the Corbelans), quite deaf and motionless
in an armchair--Antonia could hold her own in a discussion with
two or three men at a time. Obviously she was not the girl to be
content with peeping through a barred window at a cloaked figure
of a lover ensconced in a doorway opposite--which is the correct
form of Costaguana courtship. It was generally believed that with
her foreign upbringing and foreign ideas the learned and proud
Antonia would never marry--unless, indeed, she married a
foreigner from Europe or North America, now that Sulaco seemed on
the point of being invaded by all the world.