me when I could turn my back on California, and I
felt sure that I should remain away for ten years at least. I thought
that the liberty I had longed for all my life was mine at last. In a
conducted tour, I soon discovered, there was little liberty, to say
nothing of privacy. Before I had been two days in the train I was made
to feel that there was something wrong with a person that showed a
disposition to retire into herself. She was either aristocratic, or had
something to hide, unless she responded to the confidences natural to
people of that class. As there were just eighteen in the party, of
course I always had a room partner, and there was not a woman in the
entire company that I would have known from choice. However, it was
excellent discipline, not unenlightening, and the end came in six weeks.
They sailed from Naples and I wandered about by myself. In a way the
liberty was intoxicating, but of course the sum of it was lessened by
the daily irritations of travel in Europe: the rapacity of the Italians
and French, the wretched trains, the hordes of vulgar tourists, mostly
of my own nation, the absurd primness, quite foreign to my nature, I was
forced to assume when alone with a man who was neither English nor
American, the awful fatigues, the ennuis of long rainy days in the
second-rate hotels and pensions I had to frequent. Still, I was too
young for any unpleasant impression to take root and discourage me, and
there was much that was wholly delightful. I spent weeks in a city or
even village that took my fancy. But even so it was not long before I
realized that my liberty was as far off as ever, because my soul at
least was possessed by the image of the prince, the more tormenting and
insistent as his outlines were so remarkably vague. In the intervals
when novelty ceased to appeal, when my very eyes refused to look at
things, I pictured inexpressibly thrilling and romantic futures. Then I
would fall into a panic at the passing of youth, for a woman never feels
so old again as between eighteen and twenty-five--her first
quarter-century.

"And I did not lack opportunities. I met many people, some of them quite
charming. But they left me cold.

"Then I lived the student life in Paris, studying art just enough to
give me the raison d'etre. It was very gay, very irresponsible, very
educating to a provincial miss. The restaurants with their sanded
floors, and the cosmopolitan mixture of students, generally eccentri