“Well, they’re there anyhow,” he returned. “They’ll be along in a minute or two.”
Mrs. Simms rose from her chair. “Suppose you go and bring them,” she said.
But before he could make any response, her sister intervened. “No! Oh, no!” Mildred cried in a voice of distress, and, rising, too, she caught Anne’s hand in hers. “Don’t send him! It would look as if——” She stopped, perceptibly agitated.
The surprise of the gentleman present was genuine, though not so acute as that of an inexperienced man who expects ladies never to show unreasonable and apparently causeless emotion. “Why, what’s the matter?” he said. “It doesn’t seem to me that just because two people happen to get interested in the game——”
“Never mind!” his wife said, sharply. “If you intend to take your clubs down to the locker room you’d better be doing it.”
“Very well.” He entered the clubhouse through a French window that opened upon the veranda, and his surprise was somewhat increased when his wife followed him.
“Wait,” she said, as she closed the window behind her. “Hobart Simms, I never dreamed you’d allow yourself to be put in such a position.”
“What?” he said. “What position am I in?”
“I didn’t think you were this kind of man at all,” his wife informed him with continued severity. “I always believed you were intelligent—even about women!”
“Oh, no,” he protested. “Don’t go so far as that, my dear!” He laughed as he spoke, but despite both his protest and his laughter, his looks deserved what Mrs. Simms declared to have been her previous opinion of him. Bodily, he was still a featherweight, and of that miraculous slimness which appears inconsistent with the possession of the organs necessary to sustain life; but his glance was the eagle’s.