tennis-shirt. BILL is not good-looking; he is red and freckled, and
grins vastly. He was wearing rather unclean flannels, and did not look
quite so refined and delicate as TOMMY. I compared the two boys, and
thought that I preferred BILL. In the first game of the set, BILL, who
plays wonderfully well, won easily; after that, my attention got fixed
on that third volume. I turned down a corner of the page whenever I
came across anything that was at all conventional. I was reading the
book for review, and my notice of it was to appear in _The Scalpel_
on the following Saturday. It was, on the whole, a capital novel, but
it was by an author who had been, I thought, more successful than was
good for him. He had been elected freely to the best Clubs. During
the season he had gone everywhere. Many editions of his book had been
sold. He had acquired a little cult who said extravagant things about
him in the literary papers. It is sickening to see a man reverenced
during his lifetime. I could imagine him posing before his cult and
being pleased; even before I had read a page of his novel, I had made
up my mind to administer to him a wholesome corrective in the pages of
_The Scalpel_. I was rather sorry to find that it was really a capital
novel; but it had enough faults for my purpose.

I had read for some time before I turned my attention to the game
again. When I did so, I was startled, for it was perfectly obvious
that BILL was giving the game away. His usual service is a little
like invisible lightning with a bend in it; he was now serving in a
modified manner, which he generally uses only when he is playing with
girls who are not his sisters. It was also obvious that TOMMY, who
looked very elated, fully believed that he was winning on his own
merits, and had no idea that BILL was merely allowing him to win.

[Illustration]