On the surface this is perhaps a reference to his switch from stories concerned with the sea to Nostromo's concern with life on land. But a more instructive illustration of the "change" can be glimpsed at the end of Lord Jim (1900). There Stein, the defender of the romantic dream as a bulwark against the abyss of meaninglessness and self-doubt, is seen "'preparing to leave all this; preparing to leave...' while he waves his hand sadly at his butterflies." The Conrad who returns in Nostromo has indeed left "all this," exchanging Stein's dubious optimism for a willful decent into the abyss, in which Stein's romantic dream is portrayed as the engine of all human predation, and its new defender, Antonia, can only say that "men must be used as they are."