If
love as a sentiment was the discovery of the medieval poets, love as a
moral emotion might be called that of the eighteenth-century
philosophers, who, for all their celebration of free unions and fatal
passions, were really on the side of the angels, were fighting the
battle of the spiritual against the sensual, of conscience against
appetite.
The imperceptible action of these new influences formed the real barrier
between Odo and Fulvia. The girl stood for the embodiment of the
purifying emotions that were to renew the world. Her candour, her
unapproachableness, her simple trust in him, were a part of the magic
light which the new idealism had shed over the old social structure. His
was, in short, a love large enough to include other emotions: a widening
rather than a contraction of the emotional range. Youth and propinquity
have before now broken down stronger defences; but Fulvia's situation
was an unspoken appeal to her lover's forbearance. The sense that her
safety depended on him kept his sentimental impulses in check and made
the happiness of the moment seem, in its exquisite unreality, a mere
dreamlike interlude between the facts of life.
Toward sunset they rested in an olive-orchard, tethering their horses to
the low boughs. Overhead, through the thin foliage of tarnished silver,
the sky, as the moon suffused it, melted from steel blue to a clearer
silver. A peasant-woman whose hut stood close by brought them a goat's
cheese on a vine-leaf and a jug of spring-water; and as they supped, a
little goat-herd, driving his flock down the hill, paused to watch them
with furtive woodland eyes.
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