"Absurd? Not a bit. I think it's a jolly sensible notion. I simply can't talk the sort of rot that men in love are supposed to talk—it isn't in me. All I can do is to make you a fair offer like this—a sort of challenge to single combat, you know. If I win, you give in to me; if you win, well, I shall have to chuck it, that's all."
"But Pip," said Elsie, "supposing I...."
Then she checked herself suddenly, leaving Pip to wonder what she had meant to say. He himself could see no flaw in the scheme. His own natural modesty prevented him from believing that Elsie, glorious creature, could ever desire to take him of her own free will, and consequently his simple mind had reverted to the primitive notion, inherent in most men, of marriage by conquest. His challenge to a golf-match struck him as an eminently sporting offer.
"I figured it out this way," he went on after a pause. "I said to myself, 'She will never marry me simply for the asking, of course'; so—what did you say?"
"Nothing." Elsie had suddenly ceased plaiting and parted her lips.
"So," continued Pip, "I said, 'The only way to make her give in will be to get the better of her in something—to show superiority over her in some way. It will be no use my trying to persuade her by arguments. I'm slow of speech, especially with women, and Elsie would simply talk me downstairs and into the street in about two minutes. A girl like her won't surrender without a struggle. Quite right too. I shall have to try something else. It mustn't be too one-sided either way, for if it's in her favour I shall lose, and if it's in mine she won't accept. It must be a fair match.'"
And so he continued, simply, honestly, laying bare to her all the mighty scheme whereby he proposed to overcome her stubborn resistance. He had first thought, he told her, of a single-wicket cricket-match, but had abandoned the project as being too greatly in his favour. "You keep a very straight bat for a girl," he said, "but you can never resist my slow curly one, that looks as if it were going to pitch outside the off stump, and doesn't. I know your weaknesses, you see," he added with a friendly smile.
"Yes, Pip," said Elsie, in a rather subdued tone, "some of them."
Pip then proceeded to enumerate the other tests of skill that had occurred to him. "I thought of croquet," he said, "but really croquet is such d—Well, anyhow, I don't think croquet would have done. Billiards is too fluky. Chess is piffle. There are lots of other games, but you are so—so weak!" (Elsie's slight frame stiffened indignantly at this.) "Then I thought of the golf-match, and I saw at once that that was the ticket. So I packed up my bag and wired for rooms at the hotel here, and have been waiting for you to arrive ever since the first of August."
There was a pause—a long pause. Elsie was thinking—of what, she hardly knew. Pip was watching her, anxious to see how she received his great idea. Presently he continued,—