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.

Alfieri's allusions to the learned ladies for whom Italy was noted made
Odo curious to meet the wives and daughters of his new friends; for he
knew it was only in their class that women received something more than
the ordinary conventual education; and he felt a secret desire to
compare Fulvia Vivaldi with other young girls of her kind. Learned
ladies he met, indeed; for though the women-folk of some of the
philosophers were content to cook and darn for them (and perhaps
secretly burn a candle in their behalf to Saint Thomas Aquinas or Saint
Dominick, refuters of heresy), there were others who aspired to all the
honours of scholarship, and would order about their servant-girls in
Tuscan, and scold their babies in Ciceronian Latin. Among these fair
grammarians, however, he met none that wore her learning lightly. They
were forever tripping in the folds of their doctors' gowns, and
delivering their most trivial views ex cathedra; and too often the poor
philosophers, their lords and fathers, cowered under their harangues
like frightened boys under the tongue of a schoolmaster.

It was in fact only in the household of Orazio Vivaldi that Odo found
the simplicity and grace of living for which he longed. Alfieri had
warned him not to visit the Professor too often, since the latter, being
under observation, might be compromised by the assiduity of his friends.
Odo therefore waited for some days before presenting himself, and when
he did so it was at the angelus, when the streets were crowded and a
man's comings and goings the less likely to be marked. He found Vivaldi
reading with his daughter in the long library where the Honey-Bees held
their meetings; but Fulvia at once withdrew, nor did