ced to the President and
knelt to receive her degree. The parchment was placed in her hand, the
furred hood laid on her shoulders; then, after another flourish of
rhetoric, she was led to the lectern from which her discourse was to be
delivered. Odo sat just below her, and as she took her place their eyes
met for an instant. He was caught up in the serene exaltation of her
look, as though she soared with him above wind and cloud to a region of
unshadowed calm; then her eyes fell and she began to speak.

She had a pretty mastery of Latin, and though she had never before
spoken in public, her poetical recitations, and the early habit of
intercourse with her father's friends, had given her a fair measure of
fluency and self-possession. These qualities were raised to eloquence by
the sweetness of her voice, and by the grave beauty which made the
academic gown seem her natural wear, rather than a travesty of learning.
Odo at first had some difficulty in fixing his attention on what she
said; and when he controlled his thoughts she was in the height of her
panegyric of constitutional liberty. She had begun slowly, almost
coldly; but now her theme possessed her. One by one she evoked the
familiar formulas with which his mind had once reverberated. They woke
no echo in him now; but he saw that she could still set them ringing
through the sensibilities of her hearers. As she stood there, a slight
impassioned figure, warming to her high argument, his sense of irony was
touched by the incongruity of her background. The wall behind her was
covered by an ancient fresco, fast fading under its touches of renewed
gilding, and representing the patron scholars of the mediaeval world:
the theologians, law-givers and logicians under whose protection the
free city had placed its budding liberties. There they sat, rigid and
sumptuous on their Gothic thrones: Origen, Zeno, David, Lycurgus,
Aristotle; listening in a kind of cataleptic helplessness to a
confession of faith that scattered their doctrines to the winds. As he
looked and listened, a weary sense of the reiterance of things came over
him. For what were these ancient manipulators of ideas, prestidigitators
of a vanished world of thought, but the forbears of the long line of
theorists of whom Fulvia was the last inconscient mouthpiece? The new
game was still played with the old counters, the new jugglers repeated
the old tricks; and the very words now poured out in defence of the new
c