these extremes of the game he sneeringly called golf lawyers.  When he said that he made a hole in nine, he meant nine or thereabouts—­approximately nine; nice people, he thought, should let it go at that.  So he became feared on the course, not only for his actual prowess but for his matchless optimism in casting up his score.  He was a pleased man, and considered golf a good game; and he never forgot that Wilbur Cowan had made him the golfer he was.  More than ever was he believing that Harvey D. Whipple had chosen wrongly from available Cowans.  On the day when he first made the Newbern course in, approximately, one hundred and twenty—­those short-arm iron shots were beginning to lengthen down the centre of the fairway—­he was sure of it.

* * * * *

It must be said that Sharon was alone in this conviction.  The others most concerned, had he allowed it to be known, would have been amazed by it—­Winona Penniman most of all.  Winona’s conviction was that the rejected Cowan twin conspicuously lacked those qualities that would make him desirable for adoption by any family of note, certainly not by Whipples.  He had gone from bad to worse.  Driving a truck had been bad.  There had been something to say in its favour in the early stages of his career, until the neophyte had actually chosen to wear overalls like any common driver.  In overalls he could not be mistaken for a gentleman amateur moved by a keen love for the sport of truck driving—­and golf was worse.  Glad at first of this change in his life work, Winona had been shocked to learn that golf kept people from the churches.  And the clothes, even if they did not include overalls, were not genteel.  Wilbur wore belted trousers of no distinction, rubber-soled sneakers of a neutral tint, and a sweater now so low in tone that the precise intention of its original shade was no longer to be divined.  A rowdyish cap completed the uniform.  No competent bank president, surveying the ensemble, would have for a moment considered making a bookkeeper out of the wearer.  He was farther than ever before, Winona thought, from a career of Christian gentility in which garments of a Sabbath grandeur are worn every day and proper care may be taken of the hands.

It was late in this summer that she enforced briefly a demand for genteel raiment, and kept the boy up until ten-thirty of a sleepy evening to manicure his nails.  The occasion was nothing less than the sixteenth birthday of Merle Whipple, to be celebrated by an afternoon festivity on the grounds of his home.  The brothers had met briefly and casually during Merle’s years as a Whipple; but this was to be an affair of ceremony, and Winona was determined that the unworthy twin should—­at least briefly—­appear as one not socially impossible.