“Let me get you a cup of coffee. That’ll brace you up.”
“I shall be all right,” she said with an effort.
At the call for the fourth pair she stepped to the tee and hit a ball straight down the center for 160-odd yards. It was the virtue of her game that she was straight on the pin, nine shots out of ten, thereby overcoming the handicap of greater distance sure to be against her in college competition. Great and grinful was the satisfaction of her trainer at observing the demeanor of her opponent. When he was presented to her, that gentleman, a sightly and powerful youth notable for his long drives, took one extended, admiring, and astounded survey of “M. Ames”—he had n’t known what the bewildering fates held in store for him inquired privately but passionately of high Heaven and his team-mates how a fellow was going to keep his eye on the ball with a vision like that to look at, and entered upon a disastrous career by nearly slaying, with his first drive, a squirrel in a tree a good hundred yards off the course. He recovered in time to record an unparalleled ten for the first hole. M. Ames, dead on the pin, scored a correct five. Everson (the Kirk boy) contributed three putts on the second green, and M. Ames won it in a sound four. But as his pupil took her stance for a brassie, after a respectable tee-shot from the third, Jeremy perceived with dismay that her hands were shaking. Up went her head, as she swung, and the ball darted from the toe of her club into the rough. She was out in three, but again she succumbed to star-gazing on her mashie shot, and her opponent still triangulating the course like a care-free surveyor, was able to halve it. From then on, Jeremy the mentor was in agony. Except off the tees, where she clung to her beautiful, free-limbed, lissome swing, as it were by instinct, No. 4 for Old Central topped, sliced, pulled, and scarified the helpless turf. The gallant foeman was so distressed at her obviously unusual ineptitudes, that his own game went glimmering down the grassy bypaths that lead to traps and bunkers. Only this involuntary gallantry saved M. Ames from practical extinction. As it was, she was two down at the end of the first nine, with a dismal fifty-four. As they left the ninth green she turned to Jeremy: “Would you mind not caddying for me the rest of the match?”
“But Marcia!” he cried, aghast. “What’s wrong?”
“You have got on my nerves.”
“I have n’t said a word except to steady you.”
“I am sorry,” she said inflexibly.
An angry gleam flashed in Jeremy’s eyes. “Of course, if you feel that way about it—”
“I do. I am sorry,” she repeated.
“Do you mind my following you?” he asked with semisardonic intent.