Literary society

And he offered up his space for free for the first meetings of what would turn into the West Court Fenium Movement.

So it was the Phoenix and Literary Society.

And Dr. Jerry Crowley was one of the kind of, I suppose, a famine doctor in every way.

So he would treat people for free.

Unfortunate episodes came to widen the breach.

Mrs. Smethurst’s house adjoined the links, standing to the right of the fourth tee, and, as the Literary Society was in the habit of entertaining visiting lecturers, many a golfer had foozled his drive owing to sudden loud outbursts of applause coinciding with his downswing, and, not long before this story opens, a sliced ball whizzing in at an open window had come within an ace of incapacitating Raymond Parsloe Devine, the rising young novelist, who rose at that moment a near foot and a half, from any further exercise of his art.

Two inches, indeed, to the right, and Raymond must inevitably have handed in his dinner pail.

To make matters worse, a ring at the front-door bell followed almost immediately, and the maid ushered in a young man of pleasing appearance in a sweater and baggy knickerbockers, who apologetically but firmly insisted on playing his ball where it lay, and, what with the shock of the lecturer's narrow escape and the spectacle of the intruder standing on the table and working away with a niblick, the afternoon's session had to be classed as a complete frost.

As Cuthbert, for it was he who had so nearly reduced the master roll of the rising novelists by one, hopped down from the table after his stroke, he was suddenly aware that a beautiful girl was looking at him intently.

As a matter of fact, everyone in the room was looking at him intently, none more so than Raymond Parsler Devine, for none of the others were beautiful girls.

Long as the members of Woodhill's literary society were on brain, they were short on looks, and to Cuthbert's excited eye, Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of coke.

He had never seen her before, for she had only arrived at her aunt's house on the previous day, but he was perfectly certain that life, even when lived in the midst of gravel soil, main drainage, and company's own water, was going to be a pretty poor affair if he did not see her again.