He had looked forward to the
day for many months as one of rejoicing as well as of emancipation, and
he had been grievously disappointed. There was something of ill augury,
he thought, in the appalling dulness of the guests, for they had
congratulated him upon his entry into a life exactly similar to their
own. Indeed, the more precisely similar it proved to be, the more he
would be respected when he reached their advanced age. The future
unfolded to him was not gay. He was to live forty, fifty or even sixty
years in the same round of traditions and hampered by the same net of
prejudices. He might have his romance, as his father had had before him,
but there was nothing beyond that. His father seemed perfectly satisfied
with his own unruffled existence and far from desirous of any change.
The feudalism of it all was still real in fact, though abolished in
theory, and the old prince was as much a great feudal lord as ever,
whose interests were almost tribal in their narrowness, almost sordid in
their detail, and altogether uninteresting to his presumptive heir in
the third generation.
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