His confidence decreased after the first hole was played. He outdrove her and had the distance of her, but her every stroke was down the center of the course; she never overestimated her strength, and avoided trouble. On the green she holed a twelve-foot putt—and the hole was hers.
He settled down to play his best. The thing became not merely a game of golf between a man and a girl. It seemed to him that more was at stake than victory or defeat in a pastime. He became interested, intensely interested. He wanted to win and he played to win.... And he watched the girl. She interested him. She was so utterly natural, so without pose, yet so very different from the ordinary run of girls, particularly nineteen-year-old girls. There was a tang about her. It was as if one were eating bread and all unexpectedly encountered some unidentified, some palate-intriguing spice. That defined her for Potter. If he had been going to describe her he would have said she was highly spiced.
Potter played better than usual, but at the end of the ninth hole he was two down. They had talked little. Now she sat down.
“Tired?” he asked.
“Not the least,” she said, “but I find I play the last nine better if I sit here a few minutes and get the first nine out of my mind.... Had you any friends on the Lusitania?” She asked the question suddenly.
“Yes,” he said.
“If I were a man—”
“If you were a man—?” he repeated after her.
“I’d enlist. I wouldn’t wait for this country to go to war. I’d go across. A good many boys have gone, haven’t they? I’d go across and be an aviator—or anything they’d let me be....”
“For the Allies? I took it for granted you would be on the other side of the fence.”