“Why?” I inquired.

“If I could play in eighty-five, as you and Mr. Carter do, I would not recognise one who requires from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and sixty,” laughed Miss Harding.

For the life of me I cannot recall what I said in answer to this assertion, but it was something stupid, no doubt.  She finally promised to play with me to-morrow, explaining that she and her father were about to go automobiling.

We strolled over to one of the practise tees, and I was delighted when she asked me to observe her swing, and advise her how to correct it.  I spent half an hour doing this, and she made wonderful improvement.  I hoped Carter would come along and see us, but I saw nothing of him.

While we were there, Marshall, Chilvers and Lawson passed and asked me to make up a foursome.  For the first time in my life I refused, and the way those idiots looked back at me and grinned tempted me to break a club over their heads.  There is no law to compel a man to play golf if he does not wish to.  I figured that a rest for half a day would improve my game.  The fact is, and the best golfers are coming to realise it, that a man can play so much that he goes stale.

I have just been looking back over the notes of my second entry in this diary of a golfer, and I wish to modify the statement to the effect that a woman under no circumstances appears graceful or attractive in golf attitudes.

In fact I absolutely repudiate that ungallant and prejudiced assertion.  In one place I said:  “If Miss Harding is beautiful enough to overcome the handicap which always attaches to the golf duffer, she can give Venus all sorts of odds and beat her handily.  I have yet to see the woman who shows to advantage with a golf regalia.”

I take that back, also.

To see a woman raise a golf club with a jerky, uneven stroke, and come down on the helpless turf with the head of it, as if beating a carpet, has always given me a chill and a sensation of wild rage, but there is something about the way Miss Harding does this which is actually artistic.  There are combinations of discords which make for perfect harmony, and it is the same with the little eccentricities of Miss Harding’s swing.

[Illustration:  “There is no law to compel a man to play golf”]

The poise of the head and shoulders, the sweep of the arms, and the undulations of the figure seem to take on an added charm from what might be called the “graceful crudity” of her stroke.  I do not know why this is so, but it is a fact.

I shall never forget the attempt I once made to instruct my sister in the rudimentary principles of the swing of a golf club.  She was a pretty girl; bright, lively and graceful, but after I had given her two lessons we were so mad at one another that we did not speak for weeks.  It seemingly was impossible to make her distinguish between the back sweep and the follow through.  She would persist in coming down on the tee with the face of her club, but at that she made a splendid marriage, and is a happy wife and mother.