A Few Quick Ones Read Online Free PDF

rather."
    "You would, of course."
    "Then, feeling that after all the trouble she had taken to raise me to the heights she was entitled to be let in on the inside story, I told her my reason for being so anxious to get down to scratch was that I loved a scratch girl and wanted to be worthy of her. Upon which, chuckling like a train going through a tunnel, she gave me a slap on the back which nearly drove my spine through the front of my pullover and said she had guessed it from the very start, from the moment when she first saw me dogging her footsteps with that look of dumb devotion in my eyes. You could have knocked me down with a putter."
    "She then said she would marry you?"
    "Yes. And what could I do? A girl," said Harold Pickering fretfully, "who can't distinguish between the way a man looks when he's admiring a chip shot thirty feet from the green and the way he looks when he's in love ought not to be allowed at large."
    There seemed nothing to say. The idea of suggesting that he should break off the engagement presented itself to me, but I dismissed it. Women are divided broadly into two classes - those who, when jilted, merely drop a silent tear and those who take a niblick from their bag and chase the faithless swain across country with it. It was to this latter section that Agnes Flack belonged. Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings.
    So I said nothing, and presently Harold Pickering resumed his moody putting and I left him.
     
    The contest for the club championship opened unsensationally. There are never very many entrants for this of course non-handicap event, and this year there were only four. Harold Pickering won his match against Rupert Watchett comfortably, and Sidney McMurdo, who had returned on the previous night, had no difficulty in disposing of George Bunting. The final, Pickering versus McMurdo, was to be played in the afternoon.
    Agnes Flack had walked round with Harold Pickering in the morning, and they lunched together after the game. But an appointment with her lawyer in the metropolis made it impossible for her to stay and watch the final, and she had to be content with giving him some parting words of advice.
    "The great thing," she said, as he accompanied her to her car, "is not to lose your nerve. Forget that it's a final and play your ordinary game, and you can trim the pants off him. This statement carries my personal guarantee."
    "You know his game pretty well?"
    "Backwards. We used to do our three rounds a day together, when we were engaged."
    "Engaged?"
    "Yes. Didn't I tell you? We were heading straight for the altar, apparently with no bunkers in sight, when one afternoon he took a Number Three iron when I had told him to take a Number Four. I scratched the fixture immediately. 'No man,' I said to him, 'is going to walk up the aisle with me who takes a Number Three iron for a Number Four iron shot. Pop off, Sidney McMurdo,' I said, and he gnashed his teeth and popped. I shall get the laugh of a lifetime, seeing his face when I tell him I'm engaged to you. The big lummox."
    Harold Pickering started.
    "Did you say big lummox?"
    "That was the expression I used."
    "He is robust, then?"
    "Oh, he's robust enough. He could fell an ox with a single blow, if he wasn't fond of oxen."
    "And is he - er - at all inclined to be jealous?"
    "Othello took his correspondence course."
    "I see," said Harold Pickering. "I see."
    He fell into a reverie, from which he was aroused a moment later by a deafening bellow from his companion.
    "Hey, Sidney!"
    The person she addressed was in Harold Pickering's rear. He turned, and perceived a vast man who gazed yearningly at Agnes Flack from beneath beetling eyebrows.
    "Sidney," said Agnes Flack, "I want you to meet Mr. Pickering, who is playing you in the final this afternoon, Mr. McMurdo, Mr. Pickering, my fiancé. Well, goodbye, Harold darling, I've got to rush."
    She