ccomplish this, for Lord
Ashbridge was a notably puerile performer, but he generally managed it
with tact and success, by dint of missing absurdly easy putts, and (here
his skill came in) by pulling and slicing his ball into far-distant
bunkers. Throughout the game it was his business to keep up a running
fire of admiring ejaculations such as "Well driven, my lord," or "A
fine putt, my lord. Ah! dear me, I wish I could putt like that," though
occasionally his chorus of praise betrayed him into error, and from
habit he found himself saying: "Good shot, my lord," when my lord had
just made an egregious mess of things. But on the whole he devised so
pleasantly sycophantic an atmosphere as to procure a substantial tip for
himself, and to make Lord Ashbridge conscious of being a very superior
performer. Whether at the bottom of his heart he knew he could not play
at all, he probably did not inquire; the result of his matches and his
opponent's skilfully-showered praise was sufficient for him. So now he
left the discouraging companionship of his wife and Petsy and walked
swingingly across the garden and the park to the links, there to seek
in Macpherson's applause the self-confidence that would enable him to
encounter his republican sister and his musical son with an unyielding
front.

His spirits mounted rapidly as he went. It pleased him to go jauntily
across the lawn and reflect that all this smooth turf was his, to look
at the wealth of well-tended flowers in his garden and know that all
this polychromatic loveliness was bred in Lord Ashbridge's borders (and
was graciously thrown open to the gaze of the admiring public on Sunday
afternoon, when they were begged to keep off the grass), and that Lord
Ashbridge was himself. He liked reminding himself that the towering elms
drew their leafy verdure from Lord Ashbridge's soil; that the rows of
hen-coops in the park, populous and cheeping with infant pheasants,
belonged to the same fortunate gentleman who in November would so
unerringly shoot them down as they rocketted swiftly over the highest
of his tree-tops; that to him also appertained the long-fronted Jacobean
house which stood so commandingly upon the hill-top, and glowed with
all the mellowness of its three-hundred-years-old bricks. And his
satisfaction was not wholly fatuous nor entirely personal; all these
spacious dignities were insignia (temporarily conferred on him, like
some order, and permanently conferred on his