the cutting things you think of, because with your disposition you will
get into serious trouble. If you have really good cause for being angry,
it is better to strike than to speak, and in such cases I strongly
advise you to strike first. Now go and amuse yourself, for you must have
had enough of our company. I do not think of any other advice to give
you on your coming of age."

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