outside the club-house is enough to send brave men diving for safety
beneath the sofas. Can you wonder that I am in despair? What have I to
live for?'
'There is always golf.'
'Yes, there is always golf,' she whispered bravely.
'Come and have a round this afternoon.'
'I had promised to go for a walk ...' She shuddered, then pulled herself
together. '... for a walk with George.'
I hesitated for a moment.
'Bring him along,' I said, and patted her hand. 'It may be that
together we shall find an opportunity of reasoning with him.'
She shook her head.
'You can't reason with George. He never stops talking long enough to
give you time.'
'Nevertheless, there is no harm in trying. I have an idea that this
malady of his is not permanent and incurable. The very violence with
which the germ of loquacity has attacked him gives me hope. You must
remember that before this seizure he was rather a noticeably silent
man. Sometimes I think that it is just Nature's way of restoring the
average, and that soon the fever may burn itself out. Or it may be that
a sudden shock ... At any rate, have courage.'
'I will try to be brave.'
'Capital! At half-past two on the first tee, then.'
'You will have to give me a stroke on the third, ninth, twelfth,
fifteenth, sixteenth and eighteenth,' she said, with a quaver in her
voice. 'My golf has fallen off rather lately.'
I patted her hand again.
'I understand,' I said gently. 'I understand.'
* * * * *
The steady drone of a baritone voice as I alighted from my car and
approached the first tee told me that George had not forgotten the
tryst. He was sitting on the stone seat under the chestnut-tree,
speaking a few well-chosen words on the Labour Movement.
'To what conclusion, then, do we come?' he was saying. 'We come to the
foregone and inevitable conclusion that....'
'Good afternoon, George,' I said.
He nodded briefly, but without verbal salutation. He seemed to regard
my remark as he would have regarded the unmannerly heckling of some one
at the back of the hall. He proceeded evenly with his speech, and was
still talking when Celia addressed her ball and drove off. Her drive,
coinciding with a sharp rhetorical question from George, wavered in
mid-air, and the ball trickled off into the rough half-way down the
hill. I can see the poor girl's tortured face even now. But she
breathed no word of reproach. Such is the miracle of women's love.
'Where you went wrong there,' said George, breaking off his remarks on
Labour, 'was that you have not studied the dynamics of golf
sufficiently. You did not pivot properly. You allowed your left heel to
point down the course when you were at the top of your swing. This
makes for instability and loss of distance. The fundamental law of the
dynamics of golf is that the left foot shall be solidly on the ground
