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 light over the dull figures of the domestic virtues.  Faithfulness to the family sanctities, reverence for the marriage tie, courage to sacrifice the loftiest passion to the most plodding duty:  these were qualities to touch the fancy of a generation sated with derision.  If love as a sentiment was the discovery of the medieval poets, love as a moral emotion might be called that of the eighteenth-century philosophers, who, for all their celebration of free unions and fatal passions, were really on the side of the angels, were fighting the battle of the spiritual against the sensual, of conscience against appetite.

The imperceptible action of these new influences formed the real barrier between Odo and Fulvia.  The girl stood for the embodiment of the purifying emotions that were to renew the world.  Her candour, her unapproachableness, her simple trust in him, were a part of the magic light which the new idealism had shed over the old social structure.  His was, in short, a love large enough to include other emotions:  a widening rather than a contraction of the emotional range.  Youth and propinquity have before now broken down stronger defences; but Fulvia’s situation was an unspoken appeal to her lover’s forbearance.  The sense that her safety depended on him kept his sentimental impulses in check and made the happiness of the moment seem, in its exquisite unreality, a mere dreamlike interlude between the facts of life.