Thereupon he laughed again and pushed his grandson away, evidently delighted with the lecture he had given him.  Orsino was quick to profit by the permission and was soon in the Montevarchi ballroom, doing his best to forget the lugubrious feast in his own honour at which he had lately assisted.

He was not altogether successful, however.  He had looked forward to the day for many months as one of rejoicing as well as of emancipation, and he had been grievously disappointed.  There was something of ill augury, he thought, in the appalling dulness of the guests, for they had congratulated him upon his entry into a life exactly similar to their own.  Indeed, the more precisely similar it proved to be, the more he would be respected when he reached their advanced age.  The future unfolded to him was not gay.  He was to live forty, fifty or even sixty years in the same round of traditions and hampered by the same net of prejudices.  He might have his romance, as his father had had before him, but there was nothing beyond that.  His father seemed perfectly satisfied with his own unruffled existence and far from desirous of any change.  The feudalism of it all was still real in fact, though abolished in theory, and the old prince was as much a great feudal lord as ever, whose interests were almost tribal in their narrowness, almost sordid in their detail, and altogether uninteresting to his presumptive heir in the third generation.  What was the peasant of Aquaviva, for instance, to Orsino?  Yet Sant’ Ilario and old Saracinesca took a lively interest in his doings and in the doings of four or five hundred of his kind, whom they knew by name and spoke of as belongings, much as they would have spoken of books in the library.  To collect rents from peasants and to ascertain in person whether their houses needed repair was not a career.  Orsino thought enviously of San Giacinto’s two sons, leading what seemed to him a life of comparative activity and excitement in the Italian army, and having the prospect of distinction by their own merits.  He thought of San Giacinto himself, of his ceaseless energy and of the great position he was building up.  San Giacinto was a Saracinesca as well as Orsino, bearing the same name and perhaps not less respected than the rest by the world at large, though he had sullied his hands with finance.  Even Del Ferice’s position would have been above criticism, but for certain passages in his earlier life not immediately connected with his present occupation.  And as if such instances were not enough there were, to Orsino’s certain knowledge, half a dozen men of his father’s rank even now deeply engaged in the speculations of the day.  Montevarchi was one of them, and neither he nor the others made any secret of their doings.

“Surely,” thought Orsino, “I have as good a head as any of them, except, perhaps, San Giacinto.”