burst,
"was intoxicated with vanity. We had all the information, not from
Moraga only; from others, too. There was his brother intriguing, too."

"Oh, yes!" he said. "Of course you know. You know everything. You read
all the correspondence, you write all the papers--all those State papers
that are inspired here, in this room, in blind deference to a theory
of political purity. Hadn't you Charles Gould before your eyes? Rey de
Sulaco! He and his mine are the practical demonstration of what could
have been done. Do you think he succeeded by his fidelity to a theory of
virtue? And all those railway people, with their honest work! Of course,
their work is honest! But what if you cannot work honestly till the
thieves are satisfied? Could he not, a gentleman, have told this Sir
John what's-his-name that Montero had to be bought off--he and all his
Negro Liberals hanging on to his gold-laced sleeve? He ought to have
been bought off with his own stupid weight of gold--his weight of gold,
I tell you, boots, sabre, spurs, cocked hat, and all."

She shook her head slightly. "It was impossible," she murmured.

"He wanted the whole lot? What?"

She was facing him now in the deep recess of the window, very close and
motionless. Her lips moved rapidly. Decoud, leaning his back against the
wall, listened with crossed arms and lowered eyelids. He drank the tones
of her even voice, and watched the agitated life of her throat, as if
waves of emotion had run from her heart to pass out into the air in her
reasonable words. He also had his aspirations, he aspired to carry her
away out of these deadly futilities of pronunciamientos and reforms. All
this was wrong--utterly wrong; but she fascinated him, and sometimes
the sheer sagacity of a phrase would break the charm, replace the
fascination by a sudden unwilling thrill of interest. Some women
hovered, as it were, on the threshold of genius, he reflected. They did
not want to know, or think, or understand. Passion stood for all that,
and he was ready to believe that some startlingly profound remark, some
appreciation of character, or a judgment upon an event, bordered on the
miraculous. In the mature Antonia he could see with an extraordinary
vividness the austere schoolgirl of the earlier days. She seduced his
attention; sometimes he could not restrain a murmur of assent; now and
then he advanced an objection quite seriously. Gradually they began to
argue; the curtain half hid them from