“Farming.  They call it agriculture in parliament, because they do not know what farming means.  The men who think that Italy can live without farmers are fools.  We are not a manufacturing people any more than we are a business people.  The best dictator for us would be a practical farmer, a ploughman like Cincinnatus.  Nobody who has not tried to raise wheat on an Italian mountain-side knows the great difficulties or the great possibilities of our country.  Do you know that bad as our farming is, and absurd as is our system of land taxation, we are food exporters, to a small extent?  The beginning is there.  Take my advice, be a farmer.  Manage one of the big estates you have amongst you for five or six years.  You will not do much good to the land in that time, but you will learn what land really means.  Then go into parliament and tell people facts.  That is an occupation and a career as well, which cannot be said of speculation in building lots, large or small.  If you have any ready money keep it in government bonds until you have a chance of buying something worth keeping.”

Orsino went away disappointed and annoyed.  San Giacinto’s talk about farming seemed very dull to him.  To bury himself for half a dozen years in the country in order to learn the rotation of crops and the principles of land draining did not present itself as an attractive career.  If San Giacinto thought farming the great profession of the future, why did he not try it himself?  Orsino dismissed the idea rather indignantly, and his determination to try his luck became stronger by the opposition it met.  Moreover he had expected very different language from San Giacinto, whose sober view jarred on Orsino’s enthusiastic impulse.

But he now found himself in considerable difficulty.  He was ignorant even of the first steps to be taken, and knew no one to whom he could apply for information.  There was Prince Montevarchi indeed, who though he was San Giacinto’s brother-in-law, seemed by the latter’s account to have got into trouble.  He did not understand how San Giacinto could allow his wife’s brother to ruin himself without lending him a helping hand, but San Giacinto was not the kind of man of whom people ask indiscreet questions, and Orsino had heard that the two men were not on the best of terms.  Possibly good advice had been offered and refused.  Such affairs generally end in a breach of friendship.  However that might be, Orsino would not go to Montevarchi.

He wandered aimlessly about the streets, and the money seemed to burn in his pocket, though he had carefully deposited it in a place of safety at home.  Again and again Del Ferice’s story of the carpenter and his two companions recurred to his mind.  He wondered how they had set about beginning, and he wished he could ask Del Ferice himself.  He could not go to the man’s house, but he might possibly meet him at Maria Consuelo’s.  He was surprised to find that he had almost forgotten her in his anxiety to become a man of business.  It was too early to call yet, and in order to kill the time he went home, got a horse from the stables and rode out into the country for a couple of hours.