It was but a week or two after this that Tish called me up and asked me to go to her apartment quickly, and to bring some arnica from the drug store. I went as quickly as possible, to find Hannah on the couch in the sitting room moaning loudly, and Tish putting hot flannels on her knee cap.
“It’s broken, Miss Tish,” she groaned. “I know it is.”
“Nonsense,” said Tish. “Anyhow I called to you to stay out.”
In the center of the room was a queer sort of machine, with a pole on an iron base and a dial at the top, and a ball fastened to a wire. There was a golf club on the floor.
Later on, when Hannah had been helped to her room and an arnica compress adjusted, Tish took me back and pointed to the machine.
“Two hundred and twenty yards, Lizzie,” she said, “and would have registered more but for Hannah’s leg. That’s driving.”
She then sat down and told me the entire plan. She had been working all winter, and was now confident that she could defeat Nettie Lynn. She had, after her first experience in the department store, limited herself—in another store—to approach shots. For driving she had used the machine. For putting she had cut a round hole in the carpet and had sawed an opening in the floor beneath, in which she had placed a wide-mouthed jar.
“My worst trouble, Lizzie,” she said, “was lifting my head. But I have solved it. See here.”
She then produced a short leather strap, one end of which she fastened to her belt and the other she held in her teeth. She had almost lost a front tooth at the beginning, she said, but that phase was over.
“I don’t even need it any more,” she told me. “To-morrow I shall commence placing an egg on the back of my neck as I stoop, and that with a feeling of perfect security.”