The Clicking of Cuthbert

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

star; and it is a curious fact that the spectacle of a star almost

invariably fills the most sensible moth with thoughts above his

station. No doubt, if Ramsden Waters had stuck around and waited long

enough there might have come his way in the fullness of time some nice,

homely girl with a squint and a good disposition who would have been

about his form. In his modest day dreams he had aspired to nothing

higher. But the sight of Eunice Bray seemed to have knocked all the

sense out of the man. He must have known that he stood no chance of

becoming anything to her other than a handy means of getting rid of

little Wilberforce now and again. Why, the very instant that Eunice

appeared in the place, every eligible bachelor for miles around her

tossed his head with a loud, snorting sound, and galloped madly in her

direction. Dashing young devils they were, handsome, well-knit fellows

with the figures of Greek gods and the faces of movie heroes. Any one

of them could have named his own price from the advertisers of collars.

They were the sort of young men you see standing grandly beside the

full-page picture of the seven-seater Magnifico car in the magazines.

And it was against this field that Ramsden Waters, the man with the

unshuffled face, dared to pit his feeble personality. One weeps.

Something of the magnitude of the task he had undertaken must have come

home to Ramsden at a very early point in the proceedings. At Eunice's

home, at the hour when women receive callers, he was from the start a

mere unconsidered unit in the mob scene. While his rivals clustered

thickly about the girl, he was invariably somewhere on the outskirts

listening limply to the aunt. I imagine that seldom has any young man

had such golden opportunities of learning all about dried seaweed.

Indeed, by the end of the month Ramsden Waters could not have known

more about seaweed if he had been a deep sea fish. And yet he was not

happy. He was in a position, if he had been at a dinner party and

things had got a bit slow, to have held the table spellbound with the

first hand information about dried seaweed, straight from the stable;

yet nevertheless he chafed. His soul writhed and sickened within him.

He lost weight and went right off his approach shots. I confess that my

heart bled for the man.

His only consolation was that nobody else, not even the fellows who

worked their way right through the jam and got seats in the front row

where they could glare into her eyes and hang on her lips and all that

sort of thing, seemed to be making any better progress.

And so matters went on till one day Eunice decided to take up golf. Her

motive for doing this was, I believe, simply because Kitty Manders, who

had won a small silver cup at a monthly handicap, receiving thirty-six,

was always dragging the conversation round to this trophy, and if there

was one firm article in Eunice Bray's simple creed it was that she

would be hanged if she let Kitty, who was by way of being a rival on a

small scale, put anything over on her. I do not defend Eunice, but

women are women, and I doubt if any of them really take up golf in that

holy, quest-of-the-grail spirit which animates men. I have known girls

to become golfers as an excuse for wearing pink jumpers, and one at

least who did it because she had read in the beauty hints in the

evening paper that it made you lissome. Girls will be girls.

Her first lessons Eunice received from the professional, but after that

she saved money by distributing herself among her hordes of admirers,

who were only too willing to give up good matches to devote themselves

to her tuition. By degrees she acquired a fair skill and a confidence

in her game which was not altogether borne out by results. From Ramsden

Waters she did not demand a lesson. For one thing it never occurred to

her that so poor-spirited a man could be of any use at the game, and

for another Ramsden was always busy tooling round with little

Wilberforce.

Yet it was with Ramsden that she was paired in the first competition

for which she entered, the annual mixed foursomes. And it was on the

same evening that the list of the draw went up on the notice board that

Ramsden proposed.

The mind of a man in love works in strange ways. To you and to me there

would seem to be no reason why the fact that Eunice's name and his own

had been drawn out of a hat together should so impress Ramsden, but he