is best suit for evening wear.

CHAPTER TWO.

When Casanova reentered the hall, a panelled chamber on the ground
floor, there were seated at the well-furnished board, his host and
hostess, their three daughters, and a young woman. She was wearing
a simple grey dress of some shimmering material. She had a graceful
figure. Her gaze rested on him as frankly and indifferently as if he
were a member of the household, or had been a guest a hundred times
before. Her face did not light up in the way to which he had grown
accustomed in earlier years, when he had been a charming youth, or later
in his handsome prime. But for a good while now Casanova had ceased to
expect this from a new acquaintance. Nevertheless, even of late the
mention of his name had usually sufficed to arouse on a woman's face an
expression of tardy admiration, or at least some trace of regret, which
was an admission that the hearer would have loved to meet him a few
years earlier. Yet now, when Olivo introduced him to Marcolina as Signor
Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt, she smiled as she would have smiled at
some utterly indifferent name that carried with it no aroma of adventure
and mystery. Even when he took his seat by her side, kissed her hand,
and allowed his eyes as they dwelt on her to gleam with delight and
desire, her manner betrayed nothing of the demure gratification that
might have seemed an appropriate answer to so ardent a wooing.

After a few polite commonplaces, Casanova told his neighbor that he had
been informed of her intellectual attainments, and asked what was her
chosen subject of study. Her chief interest, she rejoined, was in the
higher mathematics, to which she had been introduced by Professor
Morgagni, the renowned teacher at the university of Bologna. Casanova
expressed his surprise that so charming a young lady should have an
interest, certainly exceptional, in a dry and difficult subject.
Marcolina replied that in her view the higher mathematics was the most
imaginative of all the sciences; one might even say that its nature made
it akin to the divine. When Casanova asked for further enlightenment
upon a view so novel to him, Marcolina modestly declined to continue
the topic, declaring that the others at table, and above all her uncle,
would much rather hear some details of a newly recovered friend's
travels than listen to a philosophical disquisition.

Amalia was prompt to second the proposal; and Casanova, always wi