Meanwhile the antechamber was as full of duns as the approach to Donna
Laura's apartment at Pianura; and Odo guessed that the warmth of the
maternal welcome sprang less from natural affection than from the hope
of using his expectations as a sop to her creditors. The pittance which
the ducal treasury allowed for his education was scarce large enough to
be worth diverting to other ends; but a potential prince is a shield to
the most vulnerable fortunes. In this character Odo for the first time
found himself flattered, indulged, and made the centre of the company.
The contrast to his life of subjection at Donnaz; the precocious
initiation into motives that tainted the very fount of filial piety; the
taste of this mingled draught of adulation and disillusionment, might
have perverted a nature more self-centred than his. From this
perversion, and from many subsequent perils he was saved by a kind of
imaginative sympathy, a wondering joy in the mere spectacle of life,
that tinged his most personal impressions with a streak of the
philosophic temper. If this trait did not save him from sorrow, it at
least lifted him above pettiness; if it could not solve the difficulties
of life it could arm him to endure them. It was the best gift of the
past from which he sprang; but it was blent with another quality, a deep
moral curiosity that ennobled his sensuous enjoyment of the outward show
of life; and these elements were already tending in him, as in countless
youths of his generation, to the formation of a new spirit, the spirit
that was to destroy one world without surviving to create another.
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