heirs was an insatiate greed for intellectual feeding. They
browsed through their Baedeckers with a seeming terror lest something
erudite escape them. They pursued and captured and assimilated every
fleeting fact which might improve their minds. Until my captivity they
had no man with their party. That was probably because Aunt Sarah had
made the strategic mistake of permitting all those, whom she might
otherwise have annexed, to see her girls. She should have enlisted her
male escort first and held back the introductions until desertion was
impracticable. At all events, I had, like the imbecile I was, "fallen
for it," and surrendered my liberty. When the boat bearing the unknown
divinity set sail I was merely a satellite of Aunt Sarah's constellation
and no longer a free agent.

Because I happened to be, in a superficial way, familiar with the
tourist-tramped sections of the Continent, I became a sort of gentleman
courier, without recompense, and because I had once undertaken to be a
painter, I was expected to give extemporaneous lectures on the art
treasury of the museums. We walked several thousand miles, or maybe it
was millions, over those peculiarly hard floors which make art galleries
penitential institutions. I saw the three plain faces in every phase of
soulful rapture that can be elicited by the labors of the masters, from
Michelangelo to Murillo.

When this had gone on for several centuries, or maybe it was aeons, I
discovered that every art gallery has two or three truly interesting
features, though the full enjoyment of these was denied me. I speak of
the exits. Perhaps to the unintimidated mind of the outsider it may
appear that whatever agonies I underwent were the deserved result of my
own abjectness. It is easy to say that I might have pleaded other plans
and gone on my way enfranchised. To such a critic my only and sufficient
reply is that he or she does not know my Aunt Sarah. My Aunt Sarah says
to whomsoever she chooseth, "Go," and he goeth; "Come," and he cometh.
She knew perfectly well that I had no other plans. She correctly assumed
me to be a derelict floating without purpose and with my chart lost
over-side. She virtuously resolved that for once I should be made of
use, in assisting to improve the minds of the three plain young ladies.
Lying would have been quite futile. Consequently she said, "Come," and I
came. When I learned that we were to make the tour to the Riviera towns
by motor, I welc