and the distant heights of speculation. The old doubts, the old
dissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was too
profoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of careless
acquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoyment
of life. Some day, no doubt, the intellectual curiosity and the moral
disquietude would revive; but what he wanted now were books which
appealed not to his reason but to his emotions, which reflected as in a
mirror the rich and varied life of the senses: books that were warm to
the touch, like the little volume in his hand.

For it was not only of nature that the book spoke. Amid scenes of such
rustic freshness were set human passions as fresh and natural: a great
romantic love, subdued to duty, yet breaking forth again and again as
young shoots spring from the root of a felled tree. To
eighteenth-century readers such a picture of life was as new as its
setting. Duty, in that day, to people of quality, meant the observance
of certain fixed conventions: the correct stepping of a moral minuet; as
an inner obligation, as a voluntary tribute to Diderot's "divinity on
earth," it had hardly yet drawn breath. To depict a personal relation so
much purer and more profound than any form of sentiment then in fashion,
and then to subordinate it, unflinchingly, to the ideal of those larger
relations that link the individual to the group--this was a stroke of
originality for which it would be hard to find a parallel in modern
fiction. Here at last was an answer to the blind impulses agrope in
Odo's breast--the loosening of those springs of emotion that gushed
forth in such fresh contrast to the stagnant rills of the sentimental
pleasure-garden. To renounce a Julie would be more thrilling than--

Odo, with a sigh, thrust the book in his pocket and rose to his feet. It
was the hour of the promenade at the Valentino and he had promised the