"The lovely doctoress?" said Alfieri carelessly. "Oh, she's one of your
prodigies of female learning, such as our topsy-turvy land produces: an
incipient Laura Bassi or Gaetana Agnesi, to name the most distinguished
of their tribe; though I believe that hitherto her father's good sense
or her own has kept her from aspiring to academic honours. The beautiful
Fulvia is a good daughter, and devotes herself, I'm told, to helping
Vivaldi in his work; a far more becoming employment for one of her age
and sex than defending Latin theses before a crew of ribald students."

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