sight of this girl had set loose in him. He told me later that just to
watch her holing out her soup gave him a sort of feeling you get when
your drive collides with a rock in the middle of a tangle of rough and
kicks back into the middle of the fairway. If golf had come late in
life to Mortimer Sturgis, love came later still, and just as the golf,
attacking him in middle life, had been some golf, so was the love
considerable love. Mortimer finished his dinner in a trance, which is
the best way to do it at some hotels, and then scoured the place for
someone who would introduce him. He found such a person eventually and
the meeting took place.
* * * * *
She was a small and rather fragile-looking girl, with big blue eyes and
a cloud of golden hair. She had a sweet expression, and her left wrist
was in a sling. She looked up at Mortimer as if she had at last found
something that amounted to something. I am inclined to think it was a
case of love at first sight on both sides.
'Fine weather we're having,' said Mortimer, who was a capital
conversationalist.
'Yes,' said the girl.
'I like fine weather.'
'So do I.'
'There's something about fine weather!'
'Yes.'
'It's--it's--well, fine weather's so much finer than weather that isn't
fine,' said Mortimer.
He looked at the girl a little anxiously, fearing he might be taking
her out of her depth, but she seemed to have followed his train of
thought perfectly.
'Yes, isn't it?' she said. 'It's so--so fine.'
'That's just what I meant,' said Mortimer. 'So fine. You've just hit
it.'
He was charmed. The combination of beauty with intelligence is so rare.
'I see you've hurt your wrist,' he went on, pointing to the sling.
'Yes. I strained it a little playing in the championship.'
'The championship?' Mortimer was interested. 'It's awfully rude of me,'
he said, apologetically, 'but I didn't catch your name just now.'
'My name is Somerset.'
Mortimer had been bending forward solicitously. He overbalanced and
nearly fell off his chair. The shock had been stunning. Even before he
had met and spoken to her, he had told himself that he loved this girl
with the stored-up love of a lifetime. And she was Mary Somerset! The
hotel lobby danced before Mortimer's eyes.
The name will, of course, be familiar to you. In the early rounds of
the Ladies' Open Golf Championship of that year nobody had paid much
attention to Mary Somerset. She had survived her first two matches, but
her opponents had been nonentities like herself. And then, in the third
round, she had met and defeated the champion. From that point on, her
name was on everybody's lips. She became favourite. And she justified
the public confidence by sailing into the final and winning easily. And
here she was, talking to him like an ordinary person, and, if he could
