As an infusion of fresh blood to Odo were Alfieri’s meteoric returns to Turin.  Life moved languidly in the strait-laced city, even to a young gentleman a-tiptoe for adventure and framed to elicit it as the hazel-wand draws water.  Not that vulgar distractions were lacking.  The town, as Cantapresto had long since advised him, had its secret leniencies, its posterns opening on clandestine pleasure; but there was that in Odo which early turned him from such cheap counterfeits of living.  He accepted the diversions of his age, but with a clear sense of their worth; and the youth who calls his pleasures by their true name has learned the secret of resisting them.

Alfieri’s coming set deeper springs in motion.  His follies and extravagances were on a less provincial scale than those of Odo’s daily associates.  The breath of a freer life clung to him and his allusions were so many glimpses into a larger world.  His political theories were but the enlargement of his private grievances, but the mere play of criticism on accepted institutions was an exercise more novel and exhilirating than the wildest ride on one of his half-tamed thorough-breds.  Still chiefly a man of pleasure, and the slave, as always, of some rash infatuation, Alfieri was already shaking off the intellectual torpor of his youth; and the first stirrings of his curiosity roused an answering passion in Odo.  Their tastes were indeed divergent, for to that external beauty which was to Odo the very bloom of life, Alfieri remained insensible; while of its imaginative counterpart, its prolongation in the realm of thought and emotion, he had but the most limited conception.  But his love of ringing deeds woke the chivalrous strain in Odo, and his vague celebration of Liberty, that unknown goddess to whom altars were everywhere building, chimed with the other’s scorn of oppression and injustice.  So far, it is true, their companionship had been mainly one of pleasure; but the temper of both gave their follies that provisional character which saves them from vulgarity.

Odo, who had slept late on the morning after his friend’s return, was waked by the pompous mouthing of certain lines just then on every lip in Italy:—­

    Meet was it that, its ancient seats forsaking,
    An Empire should set forth with dauntless sail,
    And braving tempests and the deep’s betrayal,
    Break down the barriers of inviolate worlds—­
    That Cortez and Pizarro should esteem
    The blood of man a trivial sacrifice
    When, flinging down from their ancestral thrones
    Incas and Mexicans of royal line,
    They wrecked two kingdoms to refresh thy palate—­

They were the verses in which the abate Parini, in his satire of The Morning, apostrophizes the cup of chocolate which the lacquey presents to his master.  Cantapresto had in fact just entered with a cup of this beverage, and Alfieri, who stood at his friend’s bedside with unpowdered locks and a fashionable undress of Parisian cut, snatching the tray from the soprano’s hands presented it to Odo in an attitude of mock servility.