In this Odo was of one mind with him; for though Italy was used to the spectacle of the Improvisatrice and the female doctor of philosophy, it is doubtful if the character was one in which any admirer cared to see his divinity figure.  Odo, at any rate, felt a distinct satisfaction in learning that Fulvia Vivaldi had thus far made no public display of her learning.  How much pleasanter to picture her as her father’s aid, perhaps a sharer in his dreams:  a vestal cherishing the flame of Liberty in the secret sanctuary of the goddess!  He scarce knew as yet of what his feeling for the girl was compounded.  The sentiment she had roused was one for which his experience had no name:  an emotion in which awe mingled with an almost boyish sense of fellowship, sex as yet lurking out of sight as in some hidden ambush.  It was perhaps her association with a world so unfamiliar and alluring that lent her for the moment her greatest charm.  Odo’s imagination had been profoundly stirred by what he had heard and seen at the meeting of the Honey-Bees.  That impatience with the vanity of his own pursuits and with the injustice of existing conditions, which hovered like a phantom at the feast of life, had at last found form and utterance.  Parini’s satires and the bitter mockery of the “Frusta Letteraria” were but instruments of demolition; but the arguments of the Professor’s friends had that constructive quality so appealing to the urgent temper of youth.  Was the world in ruins?  Then here was a plan to rebuild it.  Was humanity in chains?  Behold the angel on the threshold of the prison!

Odo, too impatient to await the next reunion of the Honey-Bees, sought out and frequented those among the members whose conversation had chiefly attracted him.  They were grave men, of studious and retiring habit, leading the frugal life of the Italian middle-class, a life in dignified contrast to the wasteful and aimless existence of the nobility.  Odo’s sensitiveness to outward impressions made him peculiarly alive to this contrast.  None was more open than he to the seducements of luxurious living, the polish of manners, the tacit exclusion of all that is ugly or distressing; but it seemed to him that fine living should be but the flower of fine feeling, and that such external graces, when they adorned a dull and vapid society, were as incongruous as the royal purple on a clown.  Among certain of his new friends he found a clumsiness of manner somewhat absurdly allied with an attempt at Roman austerity; but he was fair-minded enough to see that the middle-class doctor or lawyer who tries to play the Cicero is, after all, a more respectable figure than the Marquess who apes Caligula or Commodus.  Still, his lurking dilettantism made him doubly alive to the elegance of the Palazzo Tournanches when he went thither from a coarse meal in the stuffy dining-parlour of one of his new acquaintances; as he never relished the discourse of the latter more than after an afternoon in the society of the Countess’s parasites.