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‘Our only comfort, these last fourteen years – a very cornerstone of foreign policy – has been our certainty, our complete certainty, that the Chinese were no more interested in the affairs of Europe than we are in the affairs of the penguins. Now all our foundations have been shaken.’
‘I do not care if they do not like me,’ he said. ‘Maybe then they will let me alone, and I will not have to stay in China.’ This thought visibly struck him, and his head came up with sudden enthusiasm. ‘If I were very offensive, do you suppose they would go away now?’ he asked. ‘Laurence, what would be particularly insulting?’
‘You British are forever sailing off to some new place; are you so discontented with your own country?’
Temeraire blinked at this intelligence. ‘You do not hatch out of eggs?’ he asked, in deep fascination. ‘How then—’ ‘I beg your pardon, I think I see Purbeck looking for me,’ Riley said, very hastily, and escaped at a speed remarkable, Laurence thought somewhat resentfully, in a man who had lately consumed nearly a quarter of his own weight again in food.
Liu Bao himself flung fuel onto the fire; having enquired and heard the tale during his visit to the deck the next day, he shook his head and opined that the ghost was a sign that someone aboard had acted immorally with a woman. This qualified nearly every man aboard; they muttered a great deal about foreign ghosts with unreasonably prudish sensibilities, and discussed the subject anxiously at meals,
I am very tired of this Government, which I have never seen, and which is always insisting that I must do disagreeable things, and does no good to anybody.’
‘You may as well say, that if a creature will not serve people, and learn their habits, it is not intelligent, and had just as well be killed,’
‘It is not fair that we should be thus restricted by others’ fears, when we have not done anything wrong;
The dragon nudged her hard and knocked her back entirely into the pond. It certainly had a reviving effect: she rose up spluttering and wide-eyed, and then yammered back at the grinning dragon
‘That is true; a dragon will endure a great deal sooner than be parted from his captain. It does not follow that a decent man would ask it of him,’
