The expression of a
great conviction had swept aside every personal animosity, and cleared
the sources of her deepest feeling. Odo felt the pressure of her
emotion. He leaned to her and their hands met.
"It shall be given them," he said.
She lifted her face to his. It shone with a great light. Once before he
had seen it so illumined, but with how different a brightness! The
remembrance stirred in him some old habit of the senses. He bent over
and kissed her.
4.7.
Never before had Odo so keenly felt the difference between theoretical
visions of liberty and their practical application. His deepest
heart-searchings showed him as sincerely devoted as ever to the cause
which had enlisted his youth. He still longed above all things to serve
his fellows; but the conditions of such service were not what he had
dreamed. How different a calling it had been in Saint Francis's day,
when hearts inflamed with the new sense of brotherhood had but to set
forth on their simple mission of almsgiving and admonition! To love
one's neighbour had become a much more complex business, one that taxed
the intelligence as much as the heart, and in the course of which
feeling must be held in firm subjection to reason. He was discouraged by
Fulvia's inability to understand the change. Hers was the missionary
spirit; and he could not but reflect how much happier she would have
been as a nun in a charitable order, a unit in some organised system of
beneficence.
He too would have been happier to serve than to command! But it is not
given to the lovers of the Lady Poverty to choose their special rank in
her household.
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