She boldly contended that doubt, mockery, nay unbelief itself, if
associated with such a wealth of knowledge, such absolute honesty, and
such high courage, must be more pleasing to God than the humility of
the pious, which was apt to be a mask for lack of capacity to think
logically, and often enough--there were plenty of examples--a mask for
cowardice and hypocrisy.

Casanova listened with growing astonishment. He felt quite incompetent
to convert Marcolina to his own way of thinking; all the more as he
increasingly realized that her counterstrokes were threatening to
demolish the tottering intellectual edifice which, of late years, he
had been accustomed to mistake for faith. He took refuge in the trite
assertion that such views as Marcolina's were a menace, not only to
the ecclesiastical ordering of society, but to the very foundations of
social life. This enabled him to make a clever change of front, to pass
into the field of politics, where he hoped that his wide experience and
his knowledge of the world would render it possible for him to get the
better of his adversary. But although she lacked acquaintance with
the notable personalities of the age; although she was without inside
knowledge of courtly and diplomatic intrigues; although, therefore, she
had to renounce any attempt to answer Casanova in detail, even when
she felt there was good reason to distrust the accuracy of his
assertions--nevertheless, it was clear to him from the tenor of her
remarks, that she had little respect for the princes of the earth or
for the institutions of state; and she made no secret of her conviction
that, alike in small things and in great, the world was not so much a
world ruled by selfishness and lust for power, as a world in a condition
of hopeless confusion. Rarely had Casanova encountered such freedom of
thought in women; never had he met with anything of the kind in a girl
who was certainly not yet twenty years old. It was painful to him
to remember that in earlier and better days his own mind had with
deliberate, self-complacent boldness moved along the paths whereon
Marcolina was now advancing--although in her case there did not seem
to exist any consciousness of exceptional courage. Fascinated by the
uniqueness of her methods of thought and expression, he almost forgot
that he was walking beside a young, beautiful, desirable woman, a
forgetfulness all the more remarkable as the two were alone in the leafy
alley, and at