It was not that Giovanni Saracinesca had any intention of repressing his son’s energetic instincts, and he assuredly had no idea of the effect his words often produced.  He sometimes wondered at the sudden silence which came over the young man after such conversations, but he did not understand it and on the whole paid little attention to it.  He remembered that he himself had been different, and had been wont to argue hotly and not unfrequently to quarrel with his father about trifles.  He himself had been headstrong, passionate, often intractable in his early youth, and his father had been no better at sixty and was little improved in that respect even at his present great age.  But Orsino did not argue.  He suggested, and if any one disagreed with him he became silent.  He seemed to possess energy in action, and a number of rather fantastic aspirations, but in conversation he was easily silenced and in outward manner he would have seemed too yielding if he had not often seemed too cold.

Giovanni did not see that Orsino was most like his mother in character, while the contact with a new generation had given him something unfamiliar to the old, an affectation at first, but one which habit was amalgamating with the real nature beneath.

No doubt, it was wise and right to discourage ideas which would tend in any way to revolution.  Giovanni had seen revolutions and had been the loser by them.  It was not wise and was certainly not necessary to throw cold water on the young fellow’s harmless aspirations.  But Giovanni had lived for many years in his own way, rich, respected and supremely happy, and he believed that his way was good enough for Orsino.  He had, in his youth, tried most things for himself, and had found them failures so far as happiness was concerned.  Orsino might make the series of experiments in his turn if he pleased, but there was no adequate reason for such an expenditure of energy.  The sooner the boy loved some girl who would make him a good wife, and the sooner he married her, the sooner he would find that calm, satisfactory existence which had not finally come to Giovanni until after thirty years of age.

As for the question of fortune, it was true that there were four sons, but there was Giovanni’s mother’s fortune, there was Corona’s fortune, and there was the great Saracinesca estate behind both.  They were all so extremely rich that the deluge must be very distant.

Orsino understood none of these things.  He only realised that his father had the faculty and apparently the intention of freezing any originality he chanced to show, and he inwardly resented the coldness, quietly, if foolishly, resolving to astonish those who misunderstood him by seizing the first opportunity of doing something out of the common way.  For some time he stood in silence watching the people who came by and glancing from time to time at the dense crowd outside the barrier.  He was suddenly aware that his father was observing intently a lady who advanced along the open, way.