"How do you do?"
It was the greeting of the general's daughter. I had heard nothing--no
rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment before a sort of
premonition of evil; I had the sense of an inauspicious presence--just
that much warning and no more; and then came the sound of the voice and
the jar as of a terrible fall from a great height--a fall, let us say,
from the highest of the clouds floating in gentle procession over the
fields in the faint westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked myself
up quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair stunned
and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being uprooted out of
one world and flung down into another--perfectly civil.
"Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit down?"
That's what I said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly true
reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of confessions a la Jean
Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe! I didn't howl at her, or start
up setting furniture, or throw myself on the floor and kick, or allow
myself to hint in any other way at the appalling magnitude of the
disaster. The whole world of Costaguana (the country, you may remember,
of my seaboard tale), men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town,
campo (there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its
soil I had not placed in position with my own hands); all the history,
geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould's silver-mine,
and the splendour of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, whose name,
cried out in the night (Dr.
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