attempt to retrieve the peace and the credit of the Republic--was
very clear. At the beginning he had had to accommodate himself to
existing circumstances of corruption so naively brazen as to disarm the
hate of a man courageous enough not to be afraid of its irresponsible
potency to ruin everything it touched. It seemed to him too contemptible
for hot anger even. He made use of it with a cold, fearless scorn,
manifested rather than concealed by the forms of stony courtesy which
did away with much of the ignominy of the situation. At bottom, perhaps,
he suffered from it, for he was not a man of cowardly illusions, but
he refused to discuss the ethical view with his wife. He trusted
that, though a little disenchanted, she would be intelligent enough to
understand that his character safeguarded the enterprise of their lives
as much or more than his policy. The extraordinary development of the
mine had put a great power into his hands. To feel that prosperity
always at the mercy of unintelligent greed had grown irksome to him.
To Mrs. Gould it was humiliating. At any rate, it was dangerous. In the
confidential communications passing between Charles Gould, the King
of Sulaco, and the head of the silver and steel interests far away in
California, the conviction was growing that any attempt made by men of
education and integrity ought to be discreetly supported. "You may tell
your friend Avellanos that I think so," Mr. Holroyd had written at the
proper moment from his inviolable sanctuary within the eleven-storey
high factory of great affairs. And shortly afterwards, with a credit
opened by the Third Southern Bank (located next door but one to the
Holroyd Building), the Ribierist party in Costaguana took a practical
shape under the eye of the administrator of the San Tome mine. And Don
Jose, the hereditary friend of the Gould family, could say: "Perhaps, my
dear Carlos, I shall not have believed in vain."

CHAPTER TWO

After another armed struggle, decided by Montero's victory of Rio Seco,
had been added to the tale of civil wars, the "honest men," as Don Jose
called them, could breathe freely for the first time in half a century.
The Five-Year-Mandate law became the basis of that regeneration,
the passionate desire and hope for which had been like the elixir of
everlasting youth for Don Jose Avellanos.

And when it was suddenly--and not quite unexpectedly--endangered by that
"brute Montero," it was a passionate indigna