Page:The Smart Set (Volume 52, Number 4).djvu/12

the International trophy and was looking forward to almost as spirited a one now. Every day the teams were engaged in practice matches and the papers informed him of the time and place. On the day he determined to see the game at first hand he found that the English team would engage friendly rivalry one on which two Americans played, besides an Englizh baron and a Spanish duke. The game would be on the private estate of a Westbury millionaire. At the depot a taxi took him to the ground, where he was admitted without question. For the first time in his life he was among members of Long Island’s smart hunting set.

The big playing field with its white board border, the pavilion wherein men and women sat chatting, the groups of ponies and stable boys and the men in their polo kit might all have been familiar sights so far as the outward interest he took in them. At heart he was more excited than ever he had been. Here he was in the midst of the only sort of his countryfolk he desired to know, not as one who had paid admission, but a guest of the same benevolent magnate as they were.

Here and there were people of coarser clay whom he supposed to be the inevitable newspaper men, red-faced men with cigars and domestic panamas and a tendency to turn the greensward into a cuspidor. He turned aside from them impatiently and walked over to the stamping ponies, where a group of men were talking to some of the players. The grooms were chubby-faced little English lads, very trim in their bedford cords, and they touched their hats and dropped their “aitches” with equal readiness, and when he asked them told him the names of their famous charges.

Presently someone in authority called out, “Stand back there from the ponies.”

A few undesirable people moved back, but the men talking to the players remained as they were. And when the man who had shouted perceived Mr. Horace Blackwell, of Marshfield, catechizing the grooms on the points of the ponies he concluded that he, too, was of the elect and permitted him to remain. This was not lost upon Horace, who from time to time strolled back to the spot and proffered a patronizing remark.

It was when he had come back from this shielded spot that he heard his name called and beheld Effie Horton beaming at him. He betrayed little pleasure at meeting her.

“What brings you here?” he demanded.

“My romantic heart,” she laughed. “I could not endure Buffalo without you.”

“But the real reason?” he asked.

“A chance to get a newspaper job. I'm on the woman's page of the Evening Herald. I was on it a year ago just before I went to Buffalo, but there was a new editor who didn’t like my work—or me—and I left. Now the old one is back and sent for me. I saw you long ago, but you wouldn't leave the ponies and they wouldn’t let me in. How did you get in there?”

“Just walked in,” he said. “Those other men staved, so I did, too. I had as much right as they.”

“Oh, shucks!" she cried. “Listen to Horace talking! That tall man with the blond moustache is Lord Minster, who brought the team over. The one he's talking to is Mr. Harry Payne. Oh, yes, you have just as much right as they do! What team are you playing on today?”

Her bantering was rather pleasing than otherwise. He felt he had made an admirable beginning.

“How do you know what their names are?”

“I've come out here twice before to get the men's names and the women's dresses. I left Buffalo before you did. I've had my job two weeks already.”

As she spoke a pretty dark woman passed them with a slight, dark man, and went toward the group about the ponies.