ut perhaps the man who had
just gone away. No; no one who could be answered with careless sincerity
in the ideal perfection of confidence.

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."

CHAPTER TWELVE

Nostromo had been growing rich very slow