This feat of rhetoric over, the candidates were called on to advance and receive their degrees.  The men came first, profiting by the momentary advantage of sex, but clearly aware of its inability to confer even momentary importance in the eyes of the impatient audience.  A pause followed, and then Fulvia appeared.  Against the red-robed faculty at the back of the dais, she stood tall and slender in her black cap and gown.  The high windows of painted glass shed a paleness on her face, but her carriage was light and assured as she advanced to the President and knelt to receive her degree.  The parchment was placed in her hand, the furred hood laid on her shoulders; then, after another flourish of rhetoric, she was led to the lectern from which her discourse was to be delivered.  Odo sat just below her, and as she took her place their eyes met for an instant.  He was caught up in the serene exaltation of her look, as though she soared with him above wind and cloud to a region of unshadowed calm; then her eyes fell and she began to speak.

She had a pretty mastery of Latin, and though she had never before spoken in public, her poetical recitations, and the early habit of intercourse with her father’s friends, had given her a fair measure of fluency and self-possession.  These qualities were raised to eloquence by the sweetness of her voice, and by the grave beauty which made the academic gown seem her natural wear, rather than a travesty of learning.  Odo at first had some difficulty in fixing his attention on what she said; and when he controlled his thoughts she was in the height of her panegyric of constitutional liberty.  She had begun slowly, almost coldly; but now her theme possessed her.  One by one she evoked the familiar formulas with which his mind had once reverberated.  They woke no echo in him now; but he saw that she could still set them ringing through the sensibilities of her hearers.  As she stood there, a slight impassioned figure, warming to her high argument, his sense of irony was touched by the incongruity of her background.  The wall behind her was covered by an ancient fresco, fast fading under its touches of renewed gilding, and representing the patron scholars of the mediaeval world:  the theologians, law-givers and logicians under whose protection the free city had placed its budding liberties.  There they sat, rigid and sumptuous on their Gothic thrones:  Origen, Zeno, David, Lycurgus, Aristotle; listening in a kind of cataleptic helplessness to a confession of faith that scattered their doctrines to the winds.  As he looked and listened, a weary sense of the reiterance of things came over him.  For what were these ancient manipulators of ideas, prestidigitators of a vanished world of thought, but the forbears of the long line of theorists of whom Fulvia was the last inconscient mouthpiece?  The new game was still played with the old counters, the new jugglers repeated the old tricks; and the very words now poured out in defence of the new cause were