swam before his eyes.
You yourself saw Eunice just now: and, though you are in a sense
immune, being engaged to a charming girl of your own, I noticed that
you unconsciously braced yourself up and tried to look twice as
handsome as nature ever intended you to. You smirked and, if you had a
moustache, you would have twiddled it. You can imagine, then, the
effect which this vision of loveliness had on lonely, diffident Ramsden
Waters. It got right in amongst him.
'I'm afraid my little brother spoiled your stroke,' said Eunice. She
did not speak at all apologetically, but rather as a goddess might have
spoken to a swineherd.
Ramsden yammered noiselessly. As always in the presence of the opposite
sex, and more than ever now, his vocal cords appeared to have tied
themselves in a knot which would have baffled a sailor and might have
perplexed Houdini. He could not even gargle.
'He is very fond of watching golf,' said the girl.
She took the boy by the hand, and was about to lead him off, when
Ramsden miraculously recovered speech.
'Would he like to come round with me?' he croaked. How he had managed
to acquire the nerve to make the suggestion he could never understand.
I suppose that in certain supreme moments a sort of desperate
recklessness descends on nervous men.
'How very kind of you!' said the girl indifferently. 'But I'm afraid----'
'I want to go!' shrilled the boy. 'I want to go!'
Fond as Eunice Bray was of her little brother, I imagine that the
prospect of having him taken off her hands on a fine summer morning,
when all nature urged her to sit in the shade on the terrace and read a
book, was not unwelcome.
'It would be very kind of you if you would let him,' said Eunice. 'He
wasn't able to go to the circus last week, and it was a great
disappointment; this will do instead.'
She turned toward the terrace, and Ramsden, his head buzzing, tottered
into the jungle to find his ball, followed by the boy.
I have never been able to extract full particulars of that morning's
round from Ramsden. If you speak of it to him, he will wince and change
the subject. Yet he seems to have had the presence of mind to pump
Wilberforce as to the details of his home life, and by the end of the
round he had learned that Eunice and her brother had just come to visit
an aunt who lived in the neighbourhood. Their house was not far from
the links; Eunice was not engaged to be married; and the aunt made a
hobby of collecting dry seaweed, which she pressed and pasted in an
album. One sometimes thinks that aunts live entirely for pleasure.
At the end of the round Ramsden staggered on to the terrace, tripping
over his feet, and handed Wilberforce back in good condition. Eunice,
who had just reached the chapter where the hero decides to give up all
for love, thanked him perfunctorily without looking up from her book;
and so ended the first spasm of Ramsden Waters's life romance.
* * * * *
There are few things more tragic than the desire of the moth for the
