Merle’s homilies continued after each shot.  He subjected his own drives to a masterly analysis, and strove to incite his brother to correct form, illustrating this for his instruction with practice swings that were marvels of nicety, and learnedly quoting Braid and Vardon.

It was after one of these informative intervals, succeeding a brilliantly topped drive by the lecturer, that Patricia Whipple, full in the flooding current of Merle’s discourse, turned her speckled face aside and flagrantly winked a greenish eye at Wilbur Cowan; whereupon Wilbur Cowan winked his own left eye, that one being farthest from the speaker.  The latter, having concluded his remarks for the moment, went to find his ball, and the two walked on.

“He just ought to be taken down,” suggested Patricia, malevolently.

“Think so?” demanded Wilbur.

“Know so!” declared the girl. “’Tisn’t only golf.  He’s that way about everything—­telling people things—­how to do it and everything.  Only no one at our house dares come down on him.  Harvey D. and Ella and even grandfather—­they all jump through hoops for him, the cowards!  I give him a jolt now and then, but I get talked to for it.”

“The boy needs some golf talk—­he certainly does,” conceded the other.

“Too bad you’re afraid to do it,” Patricia said, resignedly.

She looked sadly away, then quickly back at him to see if it had taken.  She thought it hadn’t.  He was merely looking as if he also considered it too bad.  But on the next tee he astonishingly asserted himself as—–­comparatively—­a golfing expert.  He wasn’t going to have this splendid brother, truly his brother for all the change of name, making a fool of himself before a girl.  Full in the tide of Merle’s jaunty discourse he blazed out with an authority of his own, and in tones so arrogant that the importance of the other oozed almost pitiably from him.

“Quit that!  Listen!  We’ve played ten holes, and you haven’t made one clean drive, and I’ve got off every one clean.  I make this course in seventy-three, and you’d never make it in one hundred and twenty the way you’re going.  But every time you stand there and tell me things about your drive and about mine as if you could really play golf.”

“Well, but my dear chap—­” Merle paused, trying to regain some lost spiritual value—­“I’m merely telling you some little things about form.”

“Forget it!” commanded the other.  “You haven’t any form yourself; you don’t have form until you can play the game, and then you don’t think about it.  Maybe my form doesn’t stick out, but you bet it must be tucked in there somewhere or I couldn’t hit the ball.  You don’t want to think I haven’t any just because I don’t stand there and make a long speech to the ball before swatting it.”

“Well, I was only saying——­” Merle began again, but in meekness such as Patricia had never observed in him.

Hearing a sound in the background Wilbur turned.  She was staging a pantomime of excessive delight, noiselessly clapping her thin brown hands.  He frowned at her—­he was not going to have any girl laughing at his brother—­and returned his attention to the late exponent of Braid and Vardon.