"Not brought any tennis shoes? But, of course, you do play tennis?"
The question was put in such a way as to infer that if I did not, then I must be a sorry specimen of humanity indeed. But, as it happened, I did play tennis, at least, after a fashion. We had what was called a tennis lawn at home, the condition of which may be deduced from the fact that I had never imagined that it would be inadvisable to play on it in hobnailed boots if anyone so desired.
"Of course I play; but--I haven"t brought any particular shoes. Won"t these do?"
I protruded one of those which I had on. Margaret could not have seemed more startled if I had shown her a bare foot.
"Those! why, they"ve got heels."
Miss Reeves went a good deal further.
"And such heels! My dear girl"--fancy her calling me her "dear girl,"
such impertinence!--"sane people don"t wear those royal roads to deformity nowadays--they wear shoes like these."
She displayed a pair of huge, square-toed, shapeless, heelless, thick-soled monstrosities, into which nothing would ever have induced me to put my feet. I said so plainly.
"Then I"m glad that I am not sane. Sooner than wear things like that, I"d go about in my stockings. I don"t believe that mine are royal, or any other, roads to deformity, they fit me beautifully; but, at anyrate, yours are deformities ready-made."
I did not intend to allow myself to be snubbed by Miss Reeves without a struggle. She was no relative of Philip"s. But she might just as well have been; because, with one accord, they all proceeded to take her part.
"My dear Molly," said Margaret, speaking as if hers were the last words which could be said, "you are wrong. In shoes like yours you"re a prisoner. You mayn"t be conscious of it; and you won"t be till you try others. Then you"ll find out, and you"ll be sorry that you didn"t find out before. I want to be mistress of my feet; I don"t want to be their servant. I wear shoes like Pat, and nothing would induce me to wear any other kind--I know better."
"And I," echoed her mother and sister.
There they were, all three displaying--with actual gusto!--shoes which were facsimiles of those worn by Miss Reeves. They were probably the productions of the same expert in ugliness.
"You won"t be able to do anything really comfortably till you wear them too; then you"ll tell yourself what a goose you were not to have gone in for them ages ago. But you"ll find Philip"ll soon win you into the ways of wisdom."
Philip would? I should like to see Philip even dare to try. If I could not wear--without argument--shoes to please myself, then--
I imagine that Margaret perceived, from the expression of my countenance, that she had gone a little too far; because she said, in quite a different tone of voice,--
"Never mind about shoes! play in those you have on, and I"ll tell Jackson to give the lawn an extra roll in the morning."
If I had been wise I should have taken the reference to Jackson as a hint, and slipped out of playing. But my back was a wee bit up, and I was a little off my balance, so I played. Of course I made a frightful spectacle of myself. It did make me so wild.
Bertha and Margaret said they would play Miss Reeves and me, which I did not like, to begin with. Under the circ.u.mstances, I felt that one of them might have offered to take me as a partner. They might have seen that I was commencing to regard Miss Reeves as if she were covered with p.r.i.c.kles. Besides which, considering what I imagined I had come there for, and the position which I was shortly to occupy in the family, it did seem to me that they ought not to have paired me with a stranger. But as they evidently preferred to play together, they plainly did not think it worth their while to study my tastes for a moment. So I was as sugary to Miss Reeves as I could be.
"I am afraid you have a very bad partner," I observed.
"I don"t mind," she was kind enough to reply. "I expect you"re one of those dark horses who"re better than they choose to make out."
I tried to be, but I failed ignominiously. I do declare that I am not always so bad as I was then. But, as I have said, I was a little off my balance; and all I could do was make an idiot of myself. Bertha served first; my partner suggested I should take her service. I took it, or rather, I didn"t take it. She sent the b.a.l.l.s so fast that I could scarcely see them; and then there was such a twist on them, or whatever you call the thing, that I could not have hit them anyhow. I did not hit them, not one.
"What horrid b.a.l.l.s," I murmured, when Bertha had made an end.
"You seem to find them so."
My partner spoke with such excessive dryness that I could have hit her with my racket. When it came to her turn to serve she asked me a question.
"Won"t you stand up to the net and kill their returns?"
No, I would not stand up to the net and kill their returns. I did not know what she meant, but I knew that I would not do it. And I did not.
She herself played as if she had been doing nothing else all her life but play lawn-tennis. She was all over the place at once. I was only in her way, and she treated me as if I was only in her way. I had to dodge when I saw her coming, or she would have sent me flying--more than once she nearly did. It was a painful fiasco, so far as I was concerned; I have a dim suspicion that we scored nothing. When the game was finished she looked me up and down.
"Bit off your game, aren"t you?"
"I"m afraid I am," I muttered.
I was too cast down to do anything else but mutter. There was a look in her eyes which, unless I was mistaken, meant temper. And she was such a very stalwart person that I had a horrible feeling that, unless I was very careful, she might make nothing of shaking me.
"Perhaps you"re stronger in singles; I should like to play you a single; will you?"
"Thank you, some--some other time."
"Shall we say to-morrow?"
We did not say to-morrow. I would not have said to-morrow for a good deal. Margaret came to my rescue.
"You play Bertha. Molly and I"ll look on."
We looked on, while they performed prodigies. I had never before seen such playing. The idea of my a.s.sociating myself with them was preposterous. As we watched, Margaret was not so loquacious as I should have desired. In her silence I seemed to read disapprobation of the exhibition of incompetence which I had given. Moreover, when she did speak, her remarks took the form of criticisms of the play, approving this stroke, condemning that, with a degree of severity which made me wince. It was impossible to sit beside her for many seconds without realising that she regarded lawn-tennis with a seriousness of which--in that connection--I had never dreamed.
Obviously, with her, it was one of the serious things of life.
Suddenly she hit upon a theme which was not much more palatable to me than lawn-tennis had been, in such company.
"Let"s play ping-pong, you and me?"
"Ping-pong?" My heart sank afresh. It seemed in that house, that games were in the air. "Wouldn"t you rather sit here and watch them playing tennis. I like to watch them."
I would rather have watched anyone play anything than play myself. But Margaret was of a different mind.
"Oh no, what"s the fun of it? One gets rusty. Let"s do something. Of course ping-pong"s not a game one can take really in earnest; but there"s a tournament in the schoolroom on Wednesday, and I ought to keep my hand in. Come along and let"s have a knock up."
We went along. She did not give me a chance to refuse to go along. She led the way.
"Of course you _do_ play?"
"Well--I have played. But I"m quite sure that I don"t play in your sense."
"Oh, everyone plays ping-pong--the merest children even. I maintain that it"s nothing but a children"s game."
It might be. In that case, she would soon discover that I was past the age of childhood.
"Have you brought your bat?" I had not. "It doesn"t matter. We"ve got about thirty different kinds. You"re sure to find your sort among them."
A ping-pong board was set up in the billiard-room. On a table at one side were enough bats to stock a shop. I took the one she recommended, and we began.
Ping-pong is a loathsome game. I have always said it, and always shall. At home we played it on the dining-room table. The boys made sport of me. They used to declare in derision, that I played "pat-ball." I should have liked some of them to have played with Margaret. She would have played with them, or I err. I thought the serves had come in with disgusting swiftness at lawn-tennis--they were nothing compared to her serves at ping-pong. That wretched little celluloid ball whizzed over the net like lightning, and then, as I struck at it blindly, expecting it to come straight towards me, like a Christian thing, it flew off at an angle, to the right or left, and my bat encountered nothing but the air. On the other hand, when I served she smashed my ball back with such force that it leaped right out of my reach, or any one"s, and sometimes clean over the billiard-table. I had soon had enough of it.