Then he had
himself to trace in her memories, his transfigured likeness to linger
over in the Narcissus-mirror of her faith in him. This interchange of
recollections served them as well as any outspoken expression of
feeling, and the most commonplace allusion was charged with happy
meanings.
Arabia Petraea had been an Eden to such travellers; how much more the
happy slopes they were now descending! All the afternoon their path
wound down the western incline of Monte Baldo, first under huge olives,
then through thickets of laurel and acacia, to emerge on a lower level
of lemon and orange groves, with the blue lake showing through a diaper
of golden-fruited boughs. Fulvia, to whom this clear-cut southern
foliage was as new as the pure intensity of light that bathed it, seemed
to herself to be moving through the landscape of a dream. It was as
though nature had been remodelled, transformed almost, under the touch
of their love: as though they had found their way to the Hesperian
glades in which poets and painters placed the legendary lovers of
antiquity.
Such feelings were intensified by the strangeness of the situation. In
Italy the young girls of the middle class, though seemingly allowed a
greater freedom of intercourse than the daughters of noblemen, were in
reality as strictly guarded. Though, like Fulvia, they might converse
with the elderly merchants or scholars frequenting the family table,
they were never alone in the company of men, and the high standard of
conduct prevailing in the bourgeoisie forbade all thought of clandestine
intercourse.
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