“What they call ’harmless excitement’—­yes, that is what I should like sometimes.  There are days when I feel that I must have it.  It is as if the blood went to my head, and my nerves are all on edge, and I wish something would happen, I don’t know what, but something, something!”

“I know exactly what you mean, my dear boy,” said Corbario in a tone of sympathy.  “You see I am not very old myself, after all—­barely thirty—­not quite, in fact.  I could call myself twenty-nine if it were not so much more respectable to be older.”

“Yes.  But do you mean to say that you feel just what I do now and then?” Marcello asked the question in considerable surprise.  “Do you really know that sensation?  That burning restlessness—­that something like what the earth must feel before a thunderstorm—­like the air at this moment?”

Not a muscle of Folco’s still face moved.

“Yes,” he answered quietly.  “I know it very well.  It is nothing but the sudden wish for a little harmless excitement, nothing else in the world, my dear boy, and it is certainly nothing to be ashamed of.  It does not follow that it is at all convenient to yield to it, but we feel it because we lead such a very quiet life.”

“But surely, we are perfectly happy,” observed Marcello.

“Perfectly, absolutely happy.  I do not believe that there are any happier people in the world than we three, your mother, you, and I. We have not a wish unfulfilled.”

“No, except that one, when it comes.”

“And that does not count in my case,” answered Folco.  “You see I have had a good deal of—­’harmless excitement’ in my life, and I know just what it is like, and that it is quite possible to be perfectly happy without it.  In fact, I am.  But you have never had any at all, and it is as absurd to suppose that young birds will not try to fly as that young men will not want amusement, now and then.”

“I suppose that women cannot always understand that,” said Marcello, after a moment.

“Women,” replied Folco, unmoved, “do not always distinguish quite closely between excitement that is harmless for a man and excitement which is not.  To tell the truth,” he added, with a laugh, “they hardly ever distinguish at all, and it is quite useless to talk to them about it.”

“But surely, there are exceptions?”

“Not many.  That is the reason why there is a sort of freemasonry among men of the world, a kind of tacit agreement that women need not be told what goes on at the clubs, and at men’s dinners, and late at night when old friends have spent an evening together.  Not that there is any harm in it all; but women would not understand.  They have their innocent little mysteries which they keep from us, and we have harmless little secrets which we do not let them know.”

Folco laughed softly at his own way of putting it, and perhaps because Marcello so easily accepted his point of view.