"In that case," I replied, "the owner comes out in his pyjamas and offers you the choice between some nuts and a cigar." He seemed reassured, and began to address the ball. Then he paused again. "Isn't there something you say before you start?" he asked. "'Five', or something?" "You may say 'Fore!' if it makes you feel any easier. But it isn't necessary." "If I am going to learn this silly game," said Mortimer, firmly, "I am going to learn it _right_. Fore!" I watched him curiously. I never put a club into the hand of a beginner without something of the feeling of the sculptor who surveys a mass of shapeless clay. I experience the emotions of a creator. Here, I say to myself, is a semi-sentient being into whose soulless carcass I am breathing life. A moment before, he was, though technically living, a mere clod. A moment hence he will be a golfer. While I was still occupied with these meditations Mortimer swung at the ball. The club, whizzing down, brushed the surface of the rubber sphere, toppling it off the tee and propelling it six inches with a slight slice on it. "Damnation!" said Mortimer, unravelling himself. I nodded approvingly. His drive had not been anything to write to the golfing journals about, but he was picking up the technique of the game. "What happened then?" I told him in a word. "Your stance was wrong, and your grip was wrong, and you moved your head, and swayed your body, and took your eye off the ball, and pressed, and forgot to use your wrists, and swung back too fast, and let the hands get ahead of the club, and lost your balance, and omitted to pivot on the ball of the left foot, and bent your right knee." He was silent for a moment. "There is more in this pastime," he said, "than the casual observer would suspect." I have noticed, and I suppose other people have noticed, that in the golf education of every man there is a definite point at which he may be said to have crossed the dividing line--the Rubicon, as it were--that separates the golfer from the non-golfer. This moment comes immediately after his first good drive. In the ninety minutes in which I instructed Mortimer Sturgis that morning in the rudiments of the game, he made every variety of drive known to science; but it was not till we were about to leave that he made a good one. A moment before he had surveyed his blistered hands with sombre disgust. "It's no good," he said. "I shall never learn this beast of a game. And I don't want to either. It's only fit for lunatics. Where's the sense in it? Hitting a rotten little ball with a stick! If I want exercise, I'll take a stick and go and rattle it along the railings. There's something _in_ that! Well, let's be getting along. No good wasting the whole morning out here." "Try one more drive, and then we'll go." "All right. If you like. No sense in it, though."