sked Charles, "when people want you to play
lawn-tennis?"

"Sometimes I play," I said. "Sometimes I send Sophonisba. Sometimes I
tell them that my head-keeper is away and I am obliged to look after the
lop-ears. What happens to you?"

"Well, you know what lawn-tennis is like nowadays. In the bygone
butter-pat era I could hold my own with the best of them. Golf had
hardly come in, and when one wasn't playing cricket, and the spilliken
set had been mislaid, and tiddley-winks was voted too rough, a couple of
sets or so was rather fun. Soft undulating courts, very hard to keep a
footing on, and plenty of sticks and leaves to assist one's screws, and
patches of casual whiting here and there so that you could say that it
wasn't a fault but hit the line. Now all that is changed.
Panther-limbed, hawk-eyed young persons leap about the lawn dressed in
white from top to toe. They play on fast and level lawns, entirely
circumscribed by a kind of deep-sea trawling apparatus. They want you to
hit hard and well. I have only two strokes when I hit hard. One of them
pierces the bottom of the seine or drag-net fixed across the fairway,
the other brings the man round from the next-door garden but two to say
that his cucumbers are catching cold. And then I do not understand their
terms. What is a 'fore-hand drive'? It sounds like the coaching
Marathon. And how do you put on top spin? Do you wind your racquet round
and round the ball and then pull it away suddenly, or what? And
cross-volleys--what in the world are they?"

"Goodness knows," I said. "My own volleys are the best-tempered little
chaps alive. But, hang it! no one can force you to play lawn-tennis if
you don't want to."

"Can't they?" said Charles. "That's just the point. They do. They say to
me, 'You play golf and cricket; of course you can play tennis. Easiest
thing in the world.' Swish! swish! they go, making a ferocious
cross-hand top-lead from baulk with their umbrellas. 'That's how to do
it. You'll soon get into the way of the stroke.' 'That's just what I'm
afraid of,' I say, leaping nervously on to the table. But it's no good.
'Come round next Saturday afternoon,' they say, 'we shall be expecting
you,' and pass rapidly into the night before I can refuse."

"One can always have a sick headache," I reminded him.

"I did that once," said Charles. "I had been asked to play in a
tournament, and at dinner the next evening I sat next to the girl who
ought to have been my p