Personally he would have preferred to live and die unmarried, rather than to take a wife as a matter of obligation towards his family; but seeing that he had never seriously loved any woman, he had acquired the habit of contemplating such a marriage as a probability, perhaps as an ultimate necessity, to be put off as long as possible, but to which he would at last yield with a good grace.
But the current of his life had been turned.

He was certainly not a romantic character, not a man who desired to experience the external sensations to be obtained by voluntarily creating dramatic events.

He loved action, and he had a taste for danger, but he had sought both in a legitimate way; he never desired to implicate himself in adventures where the feelings were concerned, and hitherto such experiences had not fallen in his path.

As is usual with such men, when love came at last, it came with a strength such as boys of twenty do not dream of.
The mature man of thirty years, with his strong and dominant temper, his carelessness of danger, his high and untried ideals of what a true affection should be, resisting the first impressions of the master-passion with the indifference of one accustomed to believe that love could not come near his life, and was in general a thing to be avoided--a man, moreover, who by his individual gifts and by his brilliant position was able to command much that smaller men would not dream of aspiring to,--such a man, in short, as Giovanni Saracinesca,--was not likely to experience love-sickness in a mild degree.

Proud, despotic, and fiercely unyielding by his inheritance of temper, he was outwardly gentle and courteous by acquired habit, a man of those whom women easily love and men very generally fear.
He did not realise his own nature, he did not suspect the extremes of feeling of which he was eminently capable.