Westangle? I want to be on the winning side, sure."

"Oh, is this going to be a circus chariot-race?" another lamented.

"No, indeed," a girl cried, "it's to be the real thing."

It fell to Verrian, in the assortment of couples in which Mrs.
Westangle's guests sallied out to view the proposed scene of action, to
find himself, not too willingly, at Miss Macroyd's side. In his heart
and in his mind he was defending the amusement which he instantly divined
as no invention of Mrs. Westangle's, and both his heart and his mind
misgave him about this first essay of Miss Shirley in her new enterprise.
It was, as Miss Macroyd had suggested, academic, and at the same time it
had a danger in it of being tomboyish. Golf, tennis, riding, boating,
swimming--all the vigorous sports in which women now excel--were boldly
athletic, and yet you could not feel quite that they were tomboyish. Was
it because the bent of Miss Shirley was so academic that she was periling
upon tomboyishness without knowing it in this primal inspiration of hers?
Inwardly he resented the word academic, although outwardly he had
assented to it when Miss Macroyd proposed it. To be academic would be
even more fatal to Miss Shirley's ambition than to be tomboyish, and he
thought with pathos of that touch about the Italian nobility in the
Middle Ages, and how little it could have moved the tough fancies of that
crowd of well-groomed young people at the breakfast-table when Mrs.
Westangle brought it out with her ignorant acceptance of it as a social
force. After all, Miss Macroyd was about the only one who could have
felt it in the way it was meant, and she had chosen to smile at it. He
wondered if possibly she could feel the secondary pathos of it as he did.
But to make talk with her he merely asked: