'We shall never get those things,' said Orsino, who was naturally pessimistic. 'Italian unity has come too late for a renascence, and too soon for a new birth.'
San Giacinto smiled rather contemptuously.
'You are an aristocrat, my dear boy,' he answered. 'You want the clear wine without the filthy, fermenting must.'
'I think we have the same name, you and I,' observed Orsino.
'Yes, but I should be what I am, if I had been called Moscetti.'
'And I?' inquired Orsino, his eyes kindling a little at the implied contrast of powers.
'If you had been plain Signor Moscetti, you would have been a very different kind of man. You would have worked hard at architecture, I suppose, and you would have acquired an individuality. As it is, you have not much more than the individuality of your class, and very little of your own. You are a product, whereas I was forced to become a producer when I was very young—a worker, in other words. Socially, I am a Saracinesca, like you; morally and actually, I have been a man of the people all my life, because I began among the people. I have made myself what I am. You were made what you are by somebody who lived in the twelfth century. I do not blame you, and I do not boast about myself. We like each other, but we are fundamentally different, and we emphatically do not like the same things. We are different kinds of animals that happen to be called by the same name.'
'I tried to work once,' said Orsino, thoughtfully.
'A man cannot do that sort of work against the odds of sixty-four quarterings and an unlimited fortune. But you had the instinct, just as I have it. You and I have more in common with those fishermen who just went by, than we have with most of our friends in Rome. We are men, at all events, as I said of Crispi.'
Orsino was silent, for he was not in the humour to argue about anything, and he saw the truth of much that his cousin had said, and felt a hopelessness about doing anything in the world with which he had long been familiar.