The boy dimly felt that there was something false in all this urgency.  The superintendent of schools and Winona and the judge and Mrs. Penniman seemed to be tightly wound up with expectancy about him, yet lived their own lives not too tensely.  The superintendent of schools was not inspiring as a model; the judge, for all his talk, lived a life of fat idleness, with convenient maladies when the Penniman lawn needed mowing.  Mrs. Penniman, it is true, fought the battle of life steadily with her plain and fancy dressmaking, but with no visible glory; and Winona herself was becoming a drab, sedate spinster, troubled about many things.  He wondered why they should all conceive him to be meant for so much more than they had achieved.  Why couldn’t he relax into a life such as they led, without all this talk of effort and planning?  It seemed to him that people pretty much allowed life to make itself for them, and lived it as it came.  He was not going to bother about it.  Let it come.  He would find a way to live it.  People managed.  Judge Penniman was never so ailing that he couldn’t reach the harness shop for his game of checkers.  The only person he knew who had really worked hard to make something of himself was Spike Brennon.

* * * * *

So he resorted to the golf links that summer, heedless and happy.  “Without ideals so far as one can read him,” wrote Winona in her journal, underlining the indictment and closing it with three bold exclamation points.  He was welcomed effusively to the golf course by John Knox McTavish.

“Good!” said John on the morning of his appearance, which was effusive for any McTavish.

He liked the boy, not only because he drove a sweet ball, but because you could talk to him in a way you couldn’t to par-r-r-rties you was teaching to hold a club proper-r-r-r and to quit callin’ it a stick.

He caddied that summer only for golfers of the better sort, and for Sharon Whipple, choosing his employ with nice discrimination.  John had said golf was a grand game, because more than any other game it showed how many kinds of fool a man could be betwixt his mind and his muscles.  His apprentice was already sensitive to the grosser kinds.  In addition to caddying he taught the secrets of the game when pupils came too plenteously for John.  But he lacked John’s tried patience, and for the ideal teacher was too likely to utter brutal truths instead of polite and meandering diplomacies.  He had caught perhaps a bit too much of Spike Brennon’s manner of instruction, a certain strained brusquerie, out of pace with people who are willing to pay largely for instruction which they ignore in spite of its monotonous repetition.  John warned him that he must soften his clients—­butter-r-r ’em up with nice words—­or they wouldn’t come back.  He must say they was doing gr-r-rand.  He did say it now and then, but with no ring of conviction.

Still it was a good summer.  Especially good, because all the time he knew he was waiting for that morning in early September when the school bell would ring and he would laugh carelessly at what had once been the imperious summons.  He thought that after this high moment he might be able to plan his life at least a little—­not too minutely.