'Smoke! Why don't you smoke?' Don Silvio urged him, offering him some cigars while he chewed the end of his Tuscan.
Sangiorgio looked inquiringly in the lady's direction.
'My wife is accustomed to it; she does not object,' briefly commented the Minister.
Sangiorgio did not smoke, however, Donna Angelica's engaging smile notwithstanding. Seated near a little round table, he listened rather than spoke, for Don Silvio liked to be listened to. The Minister, who adored politics with the fervour of a boy of twenty, was that day greatly wrought up on the subject. In the very abuse he levelled at politics, in the very deprecations he showered on them, in his now sarcastically, now angrily nervous speech, the flaming passion for politics was evident that burned in the breast of the old Parliamentarian. And from Don Silvio, Sangiorgio seemed to hear, as if in a dream, a portion of his own thought, an echo of his own aspiring ambition, whose fancies he had never confided to a living soul. He recognised the same fever which had internally consumed him for years, while in Don Silvio the spiritual fire found expression in ideas and words. The Minister was too old, and too passionate by nature, to hide his feelings; he no longer cared to dissemble them. That inner flame must have kept Don Silvio's enthusiasm aglow. Thus did Sangiorgio reason out the cause of such prolonged and lasting vigour.
Occasionally, Don Silvio, as he looked at Sangiorgio, suppressed the sneer which deepened the furrows at the corners of his mouth, and smiled almost tenderly. Oh, he did not forget, not he, how his predecessor had fallen after a speech and a motion by Sangiorgio; he remembered Sangiorgio's brief refusal to enter the reorganized Cabinet. He had never been able to testify his gratitude, but ever since the opening of the new session had shown him his affection, had sought his company, consulted him, in a spirit of mingled deference and cordiality.
'But, at bottom, you are indifferent to power,' said Sangiorgio, after a pause in the conversation.
'No,' answered Vargas frankly, 'I am not indifferent to it; I like it; I wanted it. But the Opposition disgusts me. Sometimes it is stupid, sometimes false, sometimes brutal, and it always acts in bad faith. Where is our loyal, bold, cruel, implacable Opposition? Instead of open attack, they indulge in low pantry gossip; instead of fighting, they sneak in corners; instead of an open onslaught, it is trickery!'
'Man is a paltry creature,' observed Sangiorgio.
'He ought not to be, or ought not to appear so, if he is. By the Lord! have I not been in Opposition, too? You remember, Angelica, when I was in Opposition?'