reading of the Lettres Philosophiques, had been followed by a period of moral perturbation, during which he suffered from that sense of bewilderment, of inability to classify the phenomena of life, that is one of the keenest trials of inexperience.  Youth and nature had their way with him, however, and a wholesome reaction of indifference set in.  The invisible world of thought and conduct had been the frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world was close to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himself and the distant heights of speculation.  The old doubts, the old dissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was too profoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of careless acquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoyment of life.  Some day, no doubt, the intellectual curiosity and the moral disquietude would revive; but what he wanted now were books which appealed not to his reason but to his emotions, which reflected as in a mirror the rich and varied life of the senses:  books that were warm to the touch, like the little volume in his hand.

For it was not only of nature that the book spoke.  Amid scenes of such rustic freshness were set human passions as fresh and natural:  a great romantic love, subdued to duty, yet breaking forth again and again as young shoots spring from the root of a felled tree.  To eighteenth-century readers such a picture of life was as new as its setting.  Duty, in that day, to people of quality, meant the observance of certain fixed conventions:  the correct stepping of a moral minuet; as an inner obligation, as a voluntary tribute to Diderot’s “divinity on earth,” it had hardly yet drawn breath.  To depict a personal relation so much purer and more profound than any form of sentiment then in fashion, and then to subordinate it, unflinchingly, to the ideal of those larger relations that link the individual to the group—­this was a stroke of originality for which it would be hard to find a parallel in modern fiction.  Here at last was an answer to the blind impulses agrope in Odo’s breast—­the loosening of those springs of emotion that gushed forth in such fresh contrast to the stagnant rills of the sentimental pleasure-garden.  To renounce a Julie would be more thrilling than—­

Odo, with a sigh, thrust the book in his pocket and rose to his feet.  It was the hour of the promenade at the Valentino and he had promised the Countess Clarice to attend her.  The old high-roofed palace of the French princess lay below him, in its gardens along the river:  he could figure, as he looked down on it, the throng of carriages and chairs, the modishly dressed riders, the pedestrians crowding the footpath to watch the quality go by.  The vision of all that noise and glitter deepened the sweetness of the woodland hush.  He sighed again.  Suddenly voices sounded in the road below—­a man’s speech flecked with girlish laughter.  Odo hung