“Don’t be so meek, Steve!” she cried. “You’re impossible when you’re that way. What earthly use did you make of all of my training?”
Ventnor smiled mournfully.
“You didn’t begin soon enough, Patty,” he said.
That pleased Patricia and she made a mental resolution that marry Aurora, Steve should, if it lay in her power to accomplish it.
“There’s something wrong with that girl,” she mused, as she watched Aurora and “the Sphynx”—as McLemore was familiarly called—playing the fifth hole. “Anybody who can see anything marriageable in Jimmy McLemore, ought to be carefully confined behind a garden wall. Jimmy! I would as soon think of marrying a statue of Buddha.”
The Blue Wing was out of commission for the summer. Mortimer insisted that no sane man could maintain both a big yacht and a big country place. But Patricia was very happy and watched the development of Steve Ventnor’s romance with a jealous eye. She was obliged to admit, as the summer lengthened into autumn, that after all, the whole thing was very much a matter of golf.
Aurora was golf mad, Patricia knew, and when Jimmy McLemore ran down a twenty-foot putt for a “bird” on the sixteenth hole, thereby winning “three up and two” from Steve Ventnor, the golf championship of the Country Club, Patricia detached herself from the “gallery” which had followed the players and made her way sadly to the Club House veranda. Penelope Wharton, her sister, who was fond of Ventnor, followed, the picture of dejection. In the morning round Steve had been “one up”; and the hopes of the two women had run high that their champion would be able to increase his lead during the afternoon, or at least to maintain it against his redoubtable adversary, but after the first few holes the victor had developed one of those “streaks” for which he was famous, and though poor old Steve had played a steady up-hill game, the luck went against him and he knew at the tenth hole that unless McLemore fell over in a fit, the gold cup was lost—for that year at least.
Patricia realized, too, that the famous gold cup might not be the only prize at stake.
“And now,” she said wrathfully, “she’ll probably marry that person.” Mr. McLemore would have withered could he have seen the expression in Patricia’s eyes, for when Patricia called any human being a “person,” it meant that her thoughts were unutterable.
“I suppose so,” said Penelope.