“Helped!  Why, there are hundreds of Americans who would give anything to have some one like you to be with them in Rome.”

Mary Gowd’s whole body stiffened.  She stared fixedly at the grateful little American school-teacher.

“Some one like me—­”

The little teacher blushed very red.

“I beg your pardon.  I wasn’t thinking.  Of course you don’t need to do any such work, but I just couldn’t help saying—­”

“But I do need work,” interrupted Mary Gowd.  She stood up, her cheeks pink again for the moment, her eyes bright.  “I thank you.  Oh, I thank you!”

“You thank me!” faltered the American.

But Mary Gowd had folded her sketchbook and was off, through the vestibule, down the splendid corridor, past the giant Swiss guard, to the noisy, sunny Piazza di San Pietro.

That had been fifteen years ago.  She had taken her guide’s examinations and passed them.  She knew her Rome from the crypt of St. Peter’s to the top of the Janiculum Hill; from the Campagna to Tivoli.  She read and studied and learned.  She delved into the past and brought up strange and interesting truths.  She could tell you weird stories of those white marble men who lay so peacefully beneath St. Peter’s dome, their ringed hands crossed on their breasts.  She learned to juggle dates with an ease that brought gasps from her American clients, with their history that went back little more than one hundred years.

She learned to designate as new anything that failed to have its origin stamped B.C.; and the Magnificent Augustus, he who boasted of finding Rome brick and leaving it marble, was a mere nouveau riche with his miserable A.D. 14.

She was as much at home in the Thermae of Caracalla as you in your white-and-blue-tiled bath.  She could juggle the history of emperors with one hand and the scandals of half a dozen kings with the other.  No ruin was too unimportant for her attention—­no picture too faded for her research.  She had the centuries at her tongue’s end.  Michelangelo and Canova were her brothers in art, and Rome was to her as your back-garden patch is to you.

Mary Gowd hated this Rome as only an English woman can who has spent fifteen years in that nest of intrigue.  She fought the whole race of Roman guides day after day.  She no longer turned sick and faint when they hissed after her vile Italian epithets that her American or English clients quite failed to understand.  Quite unconcernedly she would jam down the lever of the taximeter the wily Italian cabby had pulled only halfway so that the meter might register double.  And when that foul-mouthed one crowned his heap of abuse by screaming “Camorrista!  Camor-r-rista!” at her, she would merely shrug her shoulders and say “Andate presto!” to show him she was above quarrelling with a cabman.

She ate eggs and bread, and drank the red wine, never having conquered her disgust for Italian meat since first she saw the filthy carcasses, fly-infested, dust-covered, loathsome, being carted through the swarming streets.