“Mr. Newbold!” he heard Miss Atterbury say, “I want to present you to Miss Yale. She is the captain of the Golf Club, and I knew you would want to meet her. Anyone who is such an authority on the subject as you proved yourself to be in that article would, of course, want to see the links out here.”
“Ah! thank you!” murmured Newbold; “but I play very little, you know, and I wouldn’t interrupt your game for the world!”
But Miss Yale told him how interested she
had been in his article, and that she wouldn’t feel that she had done her duty by the college unless she showed him the links, and that he really must come with them and tell them whether the meadow-land was too stiff a bit of ground to be gone over. And so Newbold found himself trudging wearily along again between Miss Atterbury and Miss Yale, who seemed as fresh as though they hadn’t moved that day. The links seemed distressingly far off, and the holes absurdly distant from each other. His arms ached so from tennis that he could scarcely hold the driver Miss Yale gave him.
“I wish you would drive off this tee once—men do that sort of thing so much better than girls,” she was saying, admiringly. “They don’t seem to need any practice at all—just comes natural to them.” Newbold had a very distinct impression that it hadn’t come at all natural to him, and he would greatly have preferred not trying before Miss Yale and the knot of young women who had drawn together at some little distance, and were very obviously watching him under the shallowest pretence of hunting for a lost ball. He felt desperately nervous, and his nervousness did not tend to disappear when he made a frantic try at the ball, digging a hole in the ground about a foot in front of the tee, and almost hitting Miss Atterbury, who jumped back with a little cry very unlike her ordinary calm self.
“I—I beg your pardon,” he began, desperately; but Miss Atterbury assured him that she was all right, and urged him to try again. He did so, and although he balanced himself cautiously on one foot and then on the other, and snapped at the ball several times before trying to hit it, and wobbled his driver after the most approved methods, he topped his ball miserably, and had the mortification of seeing it land in a most difficult hazard. And then he watched Miss Yale drive off with a good backward swing of her club, which hit the ball “sweet and clean,” and sent it a good ninety yards.
“Of course, as you said in your article,” remarked that young woman, picking up her clubs and starting off energetically after the ball, “this is no game for women. It is pre-eminently a man’s game, and a woman’s short collar-bone is never such an obvious mistake as in golf. A man can do so much with a driver or a cleek or a lofter, and the walking is so easy for him, and he is so entirely independent of the weather.” Newbold murmured inarticulate assents as he walked wearily by her. He wondered if she could keep up that pace all around the course, and he especially wondered how far around it was. He had a great deal of difficulty in getting his ball out of the hazard and lofting it up a steep hill, and he savagely wished that he had joined that golf club all his friends were urging him to join, and decided firmly to do so before he slept that night, and to engage the professional’s services for himself, and to practise till he could drive a ball off without utterly destroying all the turf in the vicinity.
They were on the second round, and Newbold was roughly calculating that his erratic plays had made him walk about three miles, and was wondering if he could live to get up the hill in front of him, when he saw Miss Thayer and Miss Yale, who were three holes ahead of him, coming back toward him.
“You look awfully tired and hot,” said Miss Thayer, sympathetically. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like golf? But what an absurd question! Anyone who could write the article on athletics you did must like it. Only, I suppose, girls seem such duffers at it, to you!”