wound down the western incline of Monte Baldo, first under huge olives,
then through thickets of laurel and acacia, to emerge on a lower level
of lemon and orange groves, with the blue lake showing through a diaper
of golden-fruited boughs. Fulvia, to whom this clear-cut southern
foliage was as new as the pure intensity of light that bathed it, seemed
to herself to be moving through the landscape of a dream. It was as
though nature had been remodelled, transformed almost, under the touch
of their love: as though they had found their way to the Hesperian
glades in which poets and painters placed the legendary lovers of
antiquity.

Such feelings were intensified by the strangeness of the situation. In
Italy the young girls of the middle class, though seemingly allowed a
greater freedom of intercourse than the daughters of noblemen, were in
reality as strictly guarded. Though, like Fulvia, they might converse
with the elderly merchants or scholars frequenting the family table,
they were never alone in the company of men, and the high standard of
conduct prevailing in the bourgeoisie forbade all thought of clandestine
intercourse. This was especially true of the families of men of letters,
where the liberal education of the young girls, and their habit of
associating as equals with men of serious and cultivated minds, gave
them a self-possession disconcerting to the young blood accustomed to
conquer with a glance. These girls as a rule, were married early to men
of their own standing, and though the cicisbeo was not unknown after
marriage he was not an authorised member of the household. Fulvia,
indeed, belonged to the class most inaccessible to men of Odo's rank:
the only class in Italy in which the wife's fidelity was as much
esteemed as the innocence of the girl. Such principles had long been
ridiculed by persons of quality and satirised by poets and playwrights.
From Aristophanes to Beaumarchais the cheated husband and the outwitted
guardian had been the figures on which the dramatist relied for his
comic effects. Even the miser tricked out of his savings was a shade
less ridiculous, less grotesquely deserving of his fate, than the
husband defrauded of his wife's affection. The plausible adulteress and
the adroit seducer had a recognised claim on the sympathy of the public.
But the inevitable reaction was at hand; and the new teachers to whom
Odo's contemporaries were beginning to listen had thrown a strangely
poetic l