Dave Cowan, when at
long intervals he lingered in Newbern from cross-country flights. It
thrilled her naughtily to be addressed as La Marquise, to be accused of
goings-on at the court of Louis XVIII, about which the less said the
better. She had never brought herself to wear the tan silk stockings of
invidious allure, and she still confined herself to her mother's
plainest dressmaking, yearning secretly for the fancy kind, but never
with enough daring. Lyman Teaford still came of an evening to play his
flute acceptably, while Winona accompanied him in many an amorous
morceau. Lyman, in the speech of Newbern, had for eight years been going
with Winona. But as the romantically impatient and sometimes a bit
snappish Mrs. Penniman would say, he had never gone far.

* * * * *

Winona rejoiced a year later when golf promised, at least for a summer,
to snatch Wilbur Cowan from the grimy indistinction of a mechanic's
career. For thriving and aspiring Newbern had eased one of its growing
pains with a veritable golf course, and the whilom machinery enthusiast
became smitten with this strange new sport. Winona rejoiced, because it
would bring him into contact with people of the better sort, for of
course only these played the game. Her charge, it is true, engaged in
the sport as a business, and not as one seeking recreation, but the
desired social contact was indubitable. To carry over the course a bag
or two of clubs for the elect of Newbern was bound to be improving.

And it was true that he now consorted daily through a profitable summer
with people who had heretofore been but names to him. But Winona had
neglected to observe that he would meet them not as a social equal but
as a hireling. This was excusable in her, because she had only the
vaguest notions of golf or of the interrelations between caddie and
player. One informed in the ways of the sport could have warned her that
caddies inevitably become cynical toward all people of the sort one
cares to meet. Compelled by a rigid etiquette to silent, unemotional
formality, they boil interiorly with contempt for people of the better
sort, not only because their golf is usually atrocious--such as every
caddie brilliantly surpasses in his leisure moments--but because the
speech provoked by their inveterate failures is commonly all too human.

So the results of Wilbur Cowan's contact with people Winona would
approve, enduring for a mercifully bri