“I thought you had turned me out of it,” said Frank.
“Oh, go away and play your game!” Elsie commanded in a tone of relief. “It is just the thing that is best for you idle laddies, with never a hand’s turn to do in this world. I am going home as soon as I have seen Johnny take up his new beast like a person of sense, after taking the pet at it like a silly bairn. You are all silly, the whole tribe of you, for so much as you think of yourselves. If you’re late, Alick and Raaf will just play a twosome, and leave you out.”
“That’s what they’ll do,” Rodie pronounced, authoritatively. “Come along, Frank.”
And Frank followed, though torn in pieces by attractions both ways. It was hard to leave Elsie in so gracious a mood, and also with Johnny Wemyss, who had displayed a quite unexpected side to-day: but Johnny Wemyss did not, could not count, whatever he might feel: surely if there was anything a man could calculate upon, it was that. And Frank was sincerely pleased to be taken into favour again by that young despot, Rodie, who in his capacity as Elsie’s brother, rode roughshod over Ralph Beaton and was more respected than he had any right to be by several more of the golf-playing community. So that it seemed a real necessity in present circumstances, with the hopes of future games in mind, to follow him docilely now.
“Why were you so petted, Johnny?” said Elsie, when reluctantly her wooer had followed her brother in a run to the links.
“I was not petted,” said Johnny, with that most ineffectual reply which consists of simple contradiction. In those days petted, that is the condition of a spoilt child, was applied to all perverse moods and causeless fits of ill-temper. I do not think that in current Scots literature, of which there are so many examples, I remember the same use of the word now.
“Oh, but you were,” cried Elsie, laughing, “in a pet with your new beast, and what could go further than that? I would not have been so much surprised if you had been in a pet with Rodie or me.”
“There was occasion,” said Johnny, relapsing a little into the clouds. “Why were you such friends with that empty-headed ass? And coming along the sands smiling at him as if—as if——”
“As if what?” said Elsie. She laughed again, the laugh of conscious power. She was not perhaps so fine a character as, considering all things, she might have been expected to be.
“Elsie,” said the young man, “it’s not me that shall name it. If it really turns out to be something, as I think it will, I am going to call it after you.”