To Fulvia, too, he knew the
music was but a forced interlude, a mechanical refuge from thought. She
had deliberately narrowed their intercourse to one central idea; and it
was her punishment that silence had come to be merely an intensified
expression of this idea.
When she turned to Odo she saw the same consciousness in his face. It
was useless for them to talk of other things. With a pang of unreasoning
regret she felt that she had become to him the embodiment of a single
thought--a formula, rather than a woman.
"Tell me what you have been doing," she said.
The question was a relief. At once he began to separation of his work.
All his thoughts, all his time, were given to the constitution which was
to define the powers of Church and state. The difficulties increased as
the work advanced; but the gravest difficulty was one of which he dared
not tell her: his own growing distrust of the ideas for which he
laboured. He was too keenly aware of the difference in their mental
operations. With Fulvia, ideas were either rejected or at once converted
into principles; with himself, they remained stored in the mind, serving
rather as commentaries on life than as incentives to action. This
perpetual accessibility to new impressions was a quality she could not
understand, or could conceive of only as a weakness. Her own mind was
like a garden in which nothing is ever transplanted. She allowed for no
intermediate stages between error and dogma, for no shifting of the
bounds of conviction; and this security gave her the singleness of
purpose in which he found himself more and more deficient.
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