rliest opportunity Mr. Direck secured
the attention of Miss Corner, and lost his interest in any one else.

"I can't play this hockey," said Mr. Direck. "I feel strange about it.
It isn't an American game. Now if it were baseball--!"

He left her to suppose him uncommonly hot stuff at baseball.

"If you're on my side," said Cecily, "mind you pass to me."

It became evident to Mr. Direck that he was going to play this hockey
after all.

"Well," he said, "if I've got to play hockey, I guess I've got to play
hockey. But can't I just get a bit of practice somewhere before the game
begins?"

So Miss Corner went off to get two sticks and a ball and came back to
instruct Mr. Direck. She said he had a good eye. The two small boys
scenting play in the air got sticks and joined them. The overnight
visitor's wife appeared from the house in abbreviated skirts, and
wearing formidable shin-guards. With her abundant fair hair, which was
already breaking loose, so to speak, to join the fray, she looked like a
short stout dismounted Valkyr. Her gaze was clear and firm.

Section 4

Hockey as it was played at the Dower House at Matching's Easy before the
war, was a game combining danger, physical exercise and kindliness in a
very high degree. Except for the infant in the perambulator and the
outwardly calm but inwardly resentful aunt, who wheeled the child up and
down in a position of maximum danger just behind the unnetted goal,
every one was involved. Quite able-bodied people acquainted with the
game played forward, the less well-informed played a defensive game
behind the forward line, elderly, infirm, and bulky persons were used
chiefly as obstacles in goal. Several players wore padded leg-guards,
and all players were assumed to have them and expected to behave
accordingly.

Proceedings began with an invidious ceremony called picking up. This was
heralded by Mr. Britling, clad in the diaphanous flannels and bearing a
hockey stick, advancing with loud shouts to the centre of the hockey
field. "Pick up! Pick up!" echoed the young Britlings.

Mr. Direck became aware of a tall, drooping man with long hair and long
digressive legs in still longer white flannel trousers, and a face that
was somehow familiar. He was talking with affectionate intimacy to
Manning, and suddenly Mr. Direck remembered that it was in Manning's
weekly paper, _The Sectarian_, in which a bitter caricaturist enlivened
a biting text, that he had become fa