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I asked her to marry me in Bombay, and I am to have her reply in Calcutta.
Glory, and the only prize in the Indian Ocean . . . the pleasing image of billowing smoke, the flash of guns, masts falling, faded almost
at once, and his heart returned to its dutiful calculating pace.
increase in his physical as well as his spiritual dimensions:
He becomes a stranger: I, too, should hesitate to address him.’
driving her by force rather than by love.
Grave: grave.
I should never voluntarily add to the unhappiness of the world by bringing even more people into it in any case;
but even if that were in my mind, the idea of Diana as a mother is absurd. There is nothing maternal about her whatsoever: her virtues are of another kind.’ He turned the wick down to a small line
he must not press home his attack against a determined resistance.’
‘We will leave that for the moment, if you please,’ said Jack. ‘We have no time to lose.
his passions would certainly yield to reason
He did not know it, but still he was willing to risk everything upon his intuition’s being sound:
They could handle their ships: could they fight them too?
impossible to dislike him,
‘A fleet worth six million of money has been saved;
and the country, to say nothing of the Company, would have been in a strange position if it had been lost.
No vast great thumping sum, but it will clear me of debt and set us up in a neat cottage with an acre or two.
You will remember the last time we met I begged you would do me the honour of marrying me.’
‘you do not really wish to marry me. You told me yourself, long ago, the hunter does not want the fox.’
‘I do not, sir. And what does your protection amount to?
He stepped forward and in his passion he gave Stephen a furious open-handed blow.
have a particular devotion to Our Lady, who was a Jewess, and I cannot feel my race superior to her;
besides, I feel for the man; I will fight him with the best will in the world.’
Canning sends it overland.’
Blessed are the peacemakers.’
‘At most times the diarist may believe he is addressing his future self: but the real height of diary-writing is the gratuitous entry,
in growing older I have lost the deeply illogical but deeply anchored conviction of immortality;
‘Dead?’
She was no good, no good at all.
Virtue: the one he esteemed above all was courage; and surely it included all the rest?
‘I always knew you were a weak man, Aubrey,’ she said, with a look of contempt. ‘But I did not know you were a scrub. You are much the same as every man I have ever known, except for Maturin – false, weak, and a coward in the end.’
‘No, sir. I do this with my own hand.’
‘Christ, Bonden,’ said Jack, ‘he opened himself slowly, with his own hands, right to the heart. I saw it beating there.’
Stephen has opened up to Diana, shown his true feeling. He’s finally been honest.
Discourses on adultery and fornication; imagined conversations with Richard Canning on the nature of the marriage-bond; sudden apostrophes – ‘Jack Aubrey, you, too, will pierce yourself with your own weapon, I fear. A bottle of wine inside you, and you will
go to bed to the next wench that shows a gleam, quit with regretting it all your days. You do not know chastity.’
‘Jew is an unearned distinction; basta...
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he had looked upon Stephen as the type of philosopher, strong, hardly touched by common feelings, sure
This Stephen, so passionate, so wholly subjugated by Diana, and so filled with doubt of every kind, left him aghast;
His cold, rational nature has given way to his passionate, open-hearted secret.
ast illi solvuntur frigore membra vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras’,
Testudo aubreii
He is the most confiding creature, wholly without distrust.
bird that haunted Diana’s Peak,
Besides, they are out of place in a man-of-war: it is their duty to tell us to turn the other cheek, and it don’t answer, not in action.
but your corpse, your parson, your St Elmo’s fire is not the cause of the tragedy.’
‘Why, as to that, Jack, you undervalue Sophie: to love her is a liberal education in itself.
Diana has gone to America with a Mr Johnstone, of Virginia:
I am in no way aggrieved; I drink to her.’
out. I set
my sights too high, that’s all.
