Impatience dominated her.  One could see that, in the nervous tapping of her fingers on the cloth; the slight swing of her right foot as she sat there, one knee crossed over the other; the glance of her keen, gray eyes down the broad drive-way that led from the huge stone gates up to the club-house.

Beside her sat a nonentity in impeccable dress, dangling a monocle and trying to make small-talk, the while he dallied with a Bronx cocktail, costing more than a day’s wage for a childish flower-making slave of the tenements, and inhaled a Rotten Row cigarette, the “last word” from London in the tobacco line.  To the sallies of this elegant, the girl replied by only monosyllables.  Her glass was empty, nor would she have it filled, despite the exquisite’s entreaties.  From time to time she glanced impatiently at the long bag of golf-sticks leaning against the porch rail; and, now and then, her eyes sought the little Cervine watch set in a leather wristlet on her arm.

“Inconsiderate of him, I’m sure—­ah—­to keep so magnificent a Diana waiting,” drawled her companion, blowing a lungful of thin blue smoke athwart the breeze.  “Especially when you’re so deuced keen on doing the course before dinner.  Now if I were the favored swain, wild horses wouldn’t keep me away.”

She made no answer, but turned a look of indifference on the shrimp beside her.  Had he possessed the soul of a real man, he would have shriveled; but, being oblivious to all things save the pride of wealth and monstrous self-conceit, he merely snickered and reached for his cocktail—­which, by the way, he was absorbing through a straw.

“I say, Miss Flint?” he presently began again, stirring the ice in the cocktail.

“Well?” she answered, curtly.

“If you—­er—­are really very, very impatient to have a go at the links, why wait for Wally?  I—­I should be only too glad to volunteer my services as your knight-errant, and all that sort of thing.”

“Thanks, awfully,” she answered, “but Mr. Waldron promised to go round the course with me, this afternoon, and I’ll wait.”

The impeccable one grinned fatuously, invited her again to have a drink—­which she declined—­and ordered another for himself, with profuse apologies for drinking alone; apologies which she hardly seemed to notice.

“Deuced bad form of Wally, I must say,” the gilded youth resumed, trying to make capital for himself, “to leave you in the lurch, this way!”

Silence from Catherine.  The would-be interloper, feeling that he was on the wrong track, took counsel with himself and remained for a moment immersed in what he imagined to be thought.  At last, however, with an oblique glance at his indifferent companion, he remarked.

“Devilish hard time women have in this world, you know!  Don’t you sometimes wish you were a man?”

Her answer flashed back like a rapier: 

“No!  Do you wish you were?”