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Romance by Joseph Conrad;Ford Madox Ford
page 64 of 567 (11%)
of me. There was Mrs. Topnambo, a withered, very dried-up personage, who
affected pink trimmings; she gave the _ton_ to the countryside as far as
ton could be given to a society that rioted with hospitality. She
made efforts to draw me out of the Macdonald environment, to make me
differentiate myself, because I was the grandson of an earl. But the
Topnambos were the great Loyalists of the place, and the Macdonalds the
principal Separationists, and I stuck to the Macdonalds. I was searching
for romance, you see, and could find none in Mrs. Topnambo's white
figure, with its dryish, gray skin, and pink patches round the neck,
that lay forever in dark or darkened rooms, and talked querulously of
"Your uncle, the earl," whom I had never seen. I didn't get on with the
men any better. They were either very dried up and querulous, too, or
else very liquorish or boisterous in an incomprehensible way. Their
evenings seemed to be a constant succession of shouts of laughter,
merging into undignified staggers of white trousers through blue
nights--round the corners of ragged huts. I never understood the hidden
sources of their humour, and I had not money enough to mix well with
their lavishness. I was too proud to be indebted to them, too.
They didn't even acknowledge me on the road at last; they called
me poor-spirited, a thin-blooded nobleman's cub--a Separationist
traitor--and left me to superintend niggers and save money. Mrs. Mac,
good Separationist though she was, as became the wife of her husband,
had the word "home" forever on her lips. She had once visited the
Rooksbys at Horton; she had treasured up a host of tiny things, parts
of my forgotten boyhood, and she talked of them and talked of them until
that past seemed a wholly desirable time, and the present a dull thing!

Journeying in search of romance--and that, after all, is our business in
this world--is much like trying to eaten the horizon. It lies a little
distance before us, and a little _distance behind--about as far as the
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