"I don't want to; I must," replied Vittorio Lante, halting nervously at the second verb.
"You must?"
"Ay," affirmed the other, shaking his shoulders and head, with the double gesture of one who is resigned to his destiny.
"And why rid yourself of that most precious benefit—liberty?" murmured Lucio Sabini, seriously but benevolently.
"Because, dear Lucio," he replied, with a motion of familiarity and confidence, "I can do nothing with my liberty. What use would it be to me?"
The other listened very intently, chewing his cigarette.
"Ah, what a weight—a great past, a great name!" exclaimed Vittorio, as if he were speaking to himself, looking at the quiet, brown waters of the lake of Sils. "I am a Lante, but of the branch of La Scala; for three generations now the Lante della Scala have been ever declining as to fortune, power, and relationship, while the cousins, the Lante della Rovere, have not only kept, but have increased their fortunes, always allying themselves for the better with the most powerful, noblest, and richest families of Europe. My father was already poor when he had me, and I am thirty and very poor. I am not ashamed to tell you about it, who have known me for such a time and wish me well, and certainly sympathise with me."
A frank and almost ingenuous sorrow emanated from every word of the young man, and nothing base escaped from such a distressing acknowledgment as his own poverty.
"You would like to make a grand marriage?" asked Lucio Sabini, quite without irony.
"My mother, who loves and adores me and suffers from our decadence, wishes it. She desires, dreams of, and invokes millions and millions for her Vittorio, for the house of Lante della Scala, to restore the great palace at Terni, so as not to sell the park where they want to found a factory."