A young woman was sitting before a counter, with her back to the street, trying on gloves.
The luncheon appointment, which had thwarted my impulse to turn into the glove shop, and so end the mystery in its incipiency, brought a long trail of complications and caused me to envy those fortunate men who are not handicapped by the possession of relatives. I have sometimes thought that the truly ideal existence would be to be born an orphan unhampered by cousins, aunts or any of those human beings who are privileged to make demands upon our times and thoughts.
From the moment when I watched the skyline of New York sink slowly behind the horizon until I reached Naples I had at least been a free agent. But hardly had I signed my guest card at Parker's Hotel and strolled out to hail a crazy Neapolitan hack when the angular and purposeful figure of my Aunt Sarah loomed up in the near foreground and—saving her grace—eclipsed the picturesqueness of the town and the distant cone of Vesuvius. I had known vaguely that this estimable lady was beating her way about Europe, guide-booked and grimly set upon self-improvement, but I had hoped to keep the area of two or three monarchies between us.
I knew that from one to the other of the Cook's Agencies she would be flitting with the same frantic energy that characterizes the industry of the ant. That I should myself pass within hailing distance of her party or be recruited in her peregrinations was a disaster which I had not anticipated. None the less the blow had fallen and I had walked unwarned into the ambuscade of her fond embrace. Aunt Sarah would now converse voluminously of cathedrals and old masters, and all the things upon which tourists are fed to a point of acute mental dyspepsia.
She had ordered me to luncheon with much the same finality as that with which royalty commands the attendance of guests at court. I had gone meekly though doing so involved passing Merola's and opened up a series of events which were destined to alter for the worse my immediate future. But the luncheon had been only the beginning, and greater misfortunes were to follow in due order.
I have never since been able to understand precisely what form of paresis seized upon me, and paralyzed my normally efficient power of lying, when she instructed me to attach myself to her party for a motor trip to Villefranche and Nice. I do know that no available mendacity occurred to my shocked brain and I found myself murmuring an acceptance. The acceptance was again meek and spineless. I had discovered at luncheon that Aunt Sarah, with that motherly obsession which appears to characterize many maiden ladies of fifty and beyond, had under wing a party of three young ladies who were capping off their educations with the post graduate "advantages" of the grand tour. That these young ladies possessed all the homely virtues, I have not the slightest doubt. Their faces and figures attested the homeliness and their virtue was such that they seemed always wondering whether their halos were on straight. Theirs 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.