their sunken
spirits by impossible tales of past accomplishments.

There is something about these twilight gatherings that suggests the
degeneracy of a rugged race; nor is the contamination of merely local
significance. There are those who lie consciously, with a certain frank,
commendable, whole-hearted plunge into iniquity. Such men return to
their worldly callings with intellectual vigor unimpaired and a natural
reaction toward the decalogue. Others of more casuistical temperament,
unable all at once to throw over the traditions of a New England
conscience to the exigencies of the game, do not burst at once into
falsehood, but by a confusing process weaken their memories and corrupt
their imaginations. They never lie of the events of the day. Rather they
return to some jumbled happening of the week before and delude
themselves with only a lingering qualm, until from habit they can create
what is really a form of paranoia, the delusion of greatness, or the
exaggerated ego. Such men, inoculated with self-deception, return to the
outer world, to deceive others, lower the standards of business
morality, contaminate politics, and threaten the vigor of the republic.
R.N. Booverman, the Treasurer, and Theobald Pickings, the unenvied
Secretary of an unenvied hoard, arrived at the first tee at precisely
ten o'clock on a certain favorable morning in early August to begin the
thirty-six holes which six times a week, six months of the year, they
played together as sympathetic and well-matched adversaries. Their
intimacy had arisen primarily from the fact that Pickings was the only
man willing to listen to Booverman's restless dissertations on the
malignant fates which seemed to pursue him even to the neglect of their
international duties, while Booverman, in fair exchange, suffered
Pickings to enlarge ad libitum on his theory of the rolling versus the
flat putting-greens.

Pickings was one of those correctly fashioned and punctilious golfers
whose stance was modeled on classic lines, whose drive, though it
averaged only twenty-five yards over the hundred, was always a
well-oiled and graceful exhibition of the Royal St. Andrew's swing, the
left sole thrown up, the eyeballs bulging with the last muscular
tension, the club carried back until the whole body was contorted into
the first position of the traditional hoop-snake preparing to descend a
hill. He used the interlocking grip, carried a bag with a spoon driver,
an aluminium