She looked up thoughtfully at the mirror, frowned in sharp disapproval—not of the mirror—and continued: “It’s really disgusting, the manœuvring to be the first to meet and annex him. Eleanor Gray and her mother are accused of having gone to New York to try to be on the same train with him! Yesterday there was a rumour that he had arrived at the Jefferson Road Inn, which is to be his temporary quarters, and the story went all round that Harriet Joyce thought she recognized him there at tea and actually fainted away in order to make him notice her. My dear, I believe it! Really, you simply couldn’t imagine the things that are going on. As for me, it is the piteous truth that this stupendous advent fails to stir me. I wish it could! But no, upon my life, I haven’t a flicker—not the faintest flicker of ordinary human curiosity to know even if he looks like his tiresome pictures. These curiosities, these stirrings are for the springtime of life, my dear, while I—as I told poor Henry last night—I am autumn!”
Thus wrote Lily that most April-like of all maidens and within the hour went forth, looking like the very spring itself, to meet an adventure comparable to adventures met only in the springtime of the world. The scene of this adventure should have been a wood near Camelot, or the Forest of Arden, and Lily a young huntress in a leathern kirtle and out with a gilded bow and painted arrows for hare or pheasant. Then, if one of her arrows had pierced the thicket and also the King’s Son on the other side of it, so that she came and took him, all swounding, in her arms, the same thing in all true essentials would have happened that happened to her to-day. The surroundings would have been more appropriate—especially for a damsel with a dead heart—than the golf course of the Blue Hills Country Club, but the hero and the heroine and the wounding and the swounding would have been identical.
In particular, there was little difference between James Herbert McArdle and a king’s son. From the time of his birth, which was announced by greater tongues than those of royal heralds, these greater tongues being the principal newspapers of the world, he was a public figure. At the age of four his likeness and those of his favourite goat and dog were made known to his fellow citizens up and down the land by means of photographic reproductions in magazines and in the Sunday prints. Lest there be fear on the part of the public that he might alter beyond recognition as he grew up, these magazines and prints continued reassuringly to present portraits of him, playing in the sea sand, or seated upon the knee of his portentous grandfather, or—with tutor and attendants—upon the platform of his father’s private car, and later, when he reached a proper age, being instructed in the technique necessary for driving his earliest automobile.
His first evening after matriculating as a freshman at a university was spent in dining and conversing with the university’s president. When, as a sophomore, he was found equal to a position in “left field” on the varsity nine, and the nine went out of town to play, reporters interviewed him and neglected to mention the captain. When he had graduated and his father and grandfather began to prepare him for the ponderous responsibilities that would some day rest upon his shoulders, there were spreading “feature articles” about him everywhere. Wherever he went, important old men hurried beamingly to his side, eager to be seen conversing with him; magnificent old ladies went beyond all amiability in caressing him; many of his contemporaries were unable to veil their deference; and lovely girls looked plentifully toward him. All his life he had been courted, attended, served, pointed out, focussed upon, stared at, and lime-lighted before the multitude. No wonder the poor young man liked solitude better than anything else!
When he contrived to be alone he protracted the experience as far as he was able; and to-day, having escaped from a welcoming committee and the mayor of the suburb that was to be his home for a year, he drove alone to the country club, which had already elected him to membership. Here he was delighted to find that the late hour and nipping air had divested the links of every player, and, attended by a lingering caddy who was unaware of his client’s identity, James Herbert set forth upon a round of the course with a leisureliness unmatched by the most elderly member of the club.
It was a leisureliness so extreme indeed that it annoyed a player who arrived in full equipment a quarter of an hour after young Mr. McArdle had made his first drive on that course. Her equipment was too complete to please her, as it happened, for he had taken the last caddy, which was another item in her list of indignations;—Lily had found time to acquire such a list since finishing her letter. Most of the items concerned that unfortunate Henry, mentioned as having been dismissed on the previous evening. Henry had called; had been turned away at the door with “Not at home”; and then, by an unworthy pretext—though his lamentable state of mind might have offered some excuse—he had secured her presence at the telephone, where merely what he said to her was furniture enough for any ordinary list of indignations. She decided to cool her temper by a solitary but vigorous round of the golf course.
Lily was one of those favoured creatures who have a genius for this most inviting yet most baffling of all the pastimes of mankind; and persistence had added so much to her native gift that a long shelf at home was needed to support the tournament prizes she had won. Various “ladies’ championships” were hers, too; and she was known among all the country clubs for miles around on account of a special talent, well practised, for marvellous little precisions of accuracy. Moreover, Lily was what players have been heard to call “conscientious” about her game. She wished ever to excel herself, to play excellently even when she played alone, and she was never quite at her best when she had no caddy; therefore she was annoyed with the gentleman ahead of her on that account, as well as because of his leisure.
If she could play “all the way round” with a fine score before darkness stopped her, Lily felt that her irritations within might be a little soothed; but she found them, on the contrary, increasing. She might have passed the laggard player if she had chosen; but his figure bore an accurate resemblance to that of a gentleman named in her letter as Captain Williams. Lily had her own reasons for avoiding any conversation with Captain Williams, to whom she had been as enigmatic, six months earlier, as she had yesterday been to Henry. She was almost certain, in fact, that the languid golfer was Captain Williams, and so kept far behind him—a difficult matter for one who wished to play at all.
She talked broodingly to herself, addressing him. “Old Thing!” she called him between her teeth. “Slow Poke! Aren’t you ever going to hit that ball! Oh, my heaven, what are you doing now? Writing your score or writing a book? Snail! Tortoise!” And as his procrastinations continued, she called him worse. “Mule!” she said, and corroborated herself vehemently. “Mule, mule, mule! You’re a mule once, you’re a mule twice, you’re a mule a hundred and eighty-seven times over—and that’s only commencing to tell you what you are!” For now, as she waited and waited, withholding her strokes intolerably as the late light waned and waned, she hated him with that great hatred most human beings feel for all things unconsciously and persistently in their way.
But in the deepening twilight haze she felt safe to approach him more closely, until finally she was less than an arrow’s flight away. He was upon the last of the greens by this time, and she, unnoticed, stood waiting for him to leave it so that she might drive her ball upon it. But here he delayed interminably. He lay prone upon the ground to study a proper aim, though he studied it so long that his purpose might have been thought a siesta; and when he rose it was to examine the sod by inches. Finally, having completed all these preliminaries and benefited little by them in their consummation, he remained standing upon the green, preoccupied with his score card. “You go on!” Lily said, dangerously. “You aren’t writing a dictionary. Go on!”