you go
quoting Baudelaire on the links.'

'Poor Paul!' his hostess murmured to her niece, 'I always tremble when I
see him exposed to Sophia's ruthless handling.'

'Yes,' whispered Hermione. 'She says she's sure he thinks of himself as
a prose Shelley; and for some reason that infuriates Sophia.'

With a somewhat forced air of amusement, Mr. Filey was following his
critic up the steps, she still mocking at his 'drives' and the way he
negotiated his bunkers.

Arrived at the top of the little terrace, whose close-shorn turf was
level with the flagged floor of the colonnade, Mr. Filey sought refuge
near Hermione, as the storm-tossed barque, fleeing before the wind, hies
swift to the nearest haven.

Bending over the Bedlington, the Amazon remained on the top step, her
long, rather good figure garbed in stuff which Filey had said was fit
only for horse-blankets, but which was Harris tweed slackly belted by a
broad canvas girdle drawn through a buckle of steel.

'_Will_ you tell me,' he moaned in Hermione's ear, 'why the daughter of
a hundred earls has the manners of a groom, and dresses herself in odds
and ends of the harness room?'

'Sh! Somebody told her once you'd said something of that sort.'

'No!' he said. 'Who?'

'It wasn't I.'

'Of course not. But did she mind? What did she say, eh?'

'She only said, "He got that out of a novel of Miss Broughton's."'

Filey looked a little dashed. 'No! Has Miss Broughton said it, too? Then
there are more of them!' He glanced again at the Amazon. 'Horrible
thought!'

'Don't be so unreasonable. She couldn't play golf in a long skirt and
high heels!'

'Who _wants_ a woman to play golf?'

Hermione gave him his tea with a smile. She knew with an absolute
precision just how perfectly at that moment she herself was presenting
the average man's picture of the ideal type of reposeful womanhood.

As Lord John and the two other men, his companions, came up the steps in
the midst of a discussion--

'If you stop to argue, Mr. Farnborough,' said Lady John, holding out a
cup, 'you won't have time for tea before you catch that train.'

'Oh, thank you!' He hastened to relieve her, while Hermione murmured
regrets that he wasn't staying. 'Lady John didn't ask me,' he confided.
As he saw in Hermione's face a project to intercede for him, he added,
'And now I've promised my mother--we've got a lot of people coming, and
two men short!'

'Two men short! how horrible for her!' She