Emilio is the only son. His father is dead, and he is in partnership with his uncles and cousins in the bank of Guasco and Co. But in spite of the fact that from childhood, boyhood, and youth he has always been in the midst of affairs, and that, during the last ten years, after a violent economic crisis, affairs in Rome are waking up again, he is a very mediocre man of business and banker. He never likes this intellectual work, which is sometimes not without its excitement and poetry, so he works at the Guasco Bank moderately, methodically, aridly, without a gleam of geniality or passion. Thus he continues his father’s work, which had been fervid, efficacious and fortunate; he continues it as a heavy duty, which he limits to the narrowest and most external mechanical participation.
Sometimes he believes that he would gladly leave the bank, leaving the bulk of his capital there but renouncing its management: sometimes he himself has vaguely hinted that he wished to hear nothing more of it. However, his cousin, Robert Guasco, forced him to stay so as not to give the appearance of weakening the bank. Robert, luckily, is a very intelligent banker, capable and laborious, and his mind, strength, and enormous activity compensate for Emilio’s cold inertia.
“Whatever do you want with an idiot and a business nonentity like me? Let me go,” Emilio often said to his cousin, with a wan smile.
“Remain, remain,” Robert would say, without taking any notice of the protest.
So Emilio Guasco remains at his work. Sometimes he even asks himself what he would do if he were to leave the firm and had to spend his considerable income alone, and how he would dedicate his time so tiring and boresome. From youth he has always felt the natural sadness of his temperament. He has tried to counteract and drive away this sadness by giving himself to the sports held in honour in Rome for years, and to the new games introduced there recently by the foreign element. Emilio is an expert and daring rider, and few have a better seat. Every year he is a faithful rider to hounds. But to this brilliant and rather fashionable sport he prefers that other hunting, solitary and melancholy, among the large regions about Palidoro, Maccarese, and Pontegalera, where one goes dressed in thick fustian, exchanging a few words with the cow-boys to be met with on horseback, wrapped in brown mantles with a lining of green serge. Sometimes he is absent two or three days at these hunts, so much in keeping with his thoughtful and sad character, sleeping in a buffalo tent as in Africa. His friends tell him of the example of Prospero Ludovisi, a keen hunter, who took a most pernicious fever at Maccarese and died suddenly of it in thirty-six hours. The malaria is especially deadly in that vast and deserted region. Emilio only smiles. Among modern sports he prefers of all the English games, on foot or horse, by sea or land, Golf--Golf, which is the adoration of all spirits fond of the open air, of solitude and silence,--Golf which is the true symbol of the solitary man. At his club he seldom mixes with the many players of poker, but he is a silent and unwearying devotee of bridge.