is swarming with
guides; but they are men guides. They besiege you in front of Cook's.
They perch at the top of the Capitoline Hill, ready to pounce on you
when you arrive panting from your climb up the shallow steps. They lie
in wait in the doorway of St. Peter's. Bland, suave, smiling, quiet, but
insistent, they dog you from the Vatican to the Catacombs.

Hundreds there are of these little men--undersized, even in this land
of small men--dapper, agile, low-voiced, crafty. In his inner coat
pocket each carries his credentials, greasy, thumb-worn documents, but
precious. He glances at your shoes--this insinuating one--or at your
hat, or at any of those myriad signs by which he marks you for his own.
Then up he steps and speaks to you in the language of your country, be
you French, German, English, Spanish or American.

And each one of this clan--each slim, feline little man in blue serge,
white-toothed, gimlet-eyed, smooth-tongued, brisk--hated Mary Gowd. They
hated her with the hate of an Italian for an outlander--with the hate of
an Italian for a woman who works with her brain--with the hate of an
Italian who sees another taking the bread out of his mouth. All this,
coupled with the fact that your Italian is a natural-born hater, may
indicate that the life of Mary Gowd had not the lyric lilt that life is
commonly reputed to have in sunny Italy.

Oh, there is no formula for Mary Gowd's story. In the first place, the
tale of how Mary Gowd came to be the one woman guide in Rome runs like
melodrama. And Mary herself, from her white cotton gloves, darned at the
fingers, to her figure, which mysteriously remained the same in spite of
fifteen years of scant Italian fare, does not fit gracefully into the
role of heroine.

Perhaps that story, scraped to bedrock, shorn of all floral features,
may gain in force what it loses in artistry.

She was twenty-two when she came to Rome--twenty-two and art-mad. She
had been pretty, with that pink-cheesecloth prettiness of the provincial
English girl, who degenerates into blowsiness at thirty. Since seventeen
she had saved and scrimped and contrived for this modest Roman holiday.
She had given painting lessons--even painted on loathsome china--that
the little hoard might grow. And when at last there was enough she had
come to this Rome against the protests of the fussy English father and
the spinster English sister.

The man she met quite casually one morning in the Sistine
Chape