“You’ll make a player,” was Bill’s pronouncement at the end of the lesson. “If you stick to it.”
Rejoined little Miss Chicago: “I’ll stick to it like a sick kitten to a warm brick. Once I take a thing up I just hold on by my teeth. Do you think you can give me another lesson to-morrow, at the same time and the same place?”
“I’ll be delighted.” And Simplicitas looked as if he meant it.
XXXVIII
THE next morning Mame received her second lesson in the art of golf. On this occasion the reluctant Gwendolen’s mashie was commandeered. As the amount of “pretty” at the edge of the putting green was strictly limited—the whole thing was no part of a bona fide course, but a makeshift affair—Bill thought, dear fellow, that Miss Du Rance had better start with the serious business of “the short approach.”
Her faculty for the short approach was marvellous. Physical power was not required. Mental concentration it was that did the trick. You kept your eye on the ball, you sort of coaxed it right up to the hole, then you took a putter and there you were. Just as easy as falling off the Monument, as Miss Du Rance drolly remarked.
Bill took so much interest in the development of her latent skill that a morning lesson of at least one hour became a permanent daily feature. In seven days she had seven lessons. And she was such a sport, and so keen to learn, and Bill took such a pride in her progress and she was altogether so jolly that before half the period was through he was calling her Mame. This course of lessons was quite the most thriving study he had ever undertaken.
Little Miss Chicago’s success was not confined to golf. After dinner there was generally music of one kind or another. Sometimes, if the day’s sport had not been too strenuous, there was dancing for the younger guests. Mame’s intelligence and lightness of foot made her an admirable pupil for several gentlemen wise in the native arts. Sometimes there were foxtrots to the strains of the victrola. In these Miss Du Rance needed no instruction. Nay, she was in a position to impart it. And there was competition to receive the same.
When the day’s stalk on the purple hills had been too fatiguing, as was sometimes the case, for even the junior sportsmen to take the floor after dinner, a piano was brought into use and comic songs were sung. Natural comedians were of the party. Bill was one. He could imitate certain music-hall stars to the life. Then there was a young chap in the Foreign Office who was so giftedly impecunious that he was seriously considering the question of exchanging a career in diplomacy which means so little in the way of lucre, for a contract with an Anglo-American syndicate to do a single on the big time. He could conjure and sing and play the fool “like old boots.” And he was so popular in consequence that he was asked to half the great houses in the kingdom.
After all was said and done, however, the biggest success in this kind was reserved for little Miss Chicago. That was the name she went by with everybody. Somehow the title seemed to fit her. Even stately Uncle John and statelier Aunt Emily, striving always for a sense of humour, that one real asset of which they had nothing to spare, alluded to her as little Miss Chicago. It was she who made the biggest hit of all.