"St. Moritz is not lacking in youths who are on the look-out for a large dowry," said Lucio, thoughtfully and doubtfully.
"I know that," exclaimed Vittorio mournfully. "I know quite well that St. Moritz is a meeting-place of big and little dowry-hunters, from him who seeks two hundred thousand francs to him who seeks ten million. And I know that people recognise them and that very often they are adventurers. Nothing makes me shudder more, Lucio, than to be mistaken for them. I am not an adventurer. I am an unfortunate gentleman, whose lot it is to bear a great name without the means to sustain it and who has not been taught how to work. I am a loving son, upon whom an adorable mother has imposed the duty of setting forth to try a conjugal adventure up there or somewhere, in homage to the lustre and claims of the Lante della Scala."
"If you dislike it so much, why attempt it? Why don't you convince your mother how much there is that is deplorable, and perhaps humiliating, in these adventures?"
"Because I would have to convince myself first," confessed Vittorio Lante sadly. "I, too, suffer from poverty; I, too, endure our slow agony; I, too, envy and almost hate my proud cousins—the others; I, too, keenly desire luxury and power. How is it to be helped? We have inherited souls, we have inherited nerves and feelings! Every now and then, through a feeling of personal dignity, I rebel against this dowry-hunting which I have been doing for two or three years; but directly afterwards obscurity and want inspire me with genuine horror. What a greedy man I must seem to you, Lucio! Still, I am a chivalrous man: I am a gentleman."
"I know others like you honourable and gentle and good, like you constrained by their destiny," observed Lucio Sabini, with tender sympathy.
Silently grateful, Vittorio Lante pressed his hand. As they proceeded the scene changed, and the views became more attractive. The big clouds had grown denser above their shoulders, towards the hill of the Maloja, which they had left some time, and the Val Bregaglia.
Denser they grew and gloomier, laden with the whirlwind of approaching night. The moon on high hung over the gentle bends of the lake of Sils.
Along the lake, full of deep nocturnal greens, which a band of light cut in the middle, ran banks quite green with large and small pines, and even on the travellers' left, along the high mountain wall they were skirting, little meadows appeared and disappeared. Amidst the rocks, trees and shrubs reared themselves, and often the carriage-wheels beat down flowers from fragrant hedges.
"Ah, if I had another name and another soul," said Vittorio Lante, after a brief silence.
"What would you do?"