our 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 cab