He settled down to play his best. The thing became not merely a game of golf between a man and a girl. It seemed to him that more was at stake than victory or defeat in a pastime. He became interested, intensely interested. He wanted to win and he played to win.... And he watched the girl. _She_ interested him. She was so utterly natural, so without pose, yet so very different from the ordinary run of girls, particularly nineteen-year-old girls. There was a _tang_ about her. It was as if one were eating bread and all unexpectedly encountered some unidentified, some palate-intriguing spice. That defined her for Potter. If he had been going to describe her he would have said she was highly spiced. Potter played better than usual, but at the end of the ninth hole he was two down. They had talked little. Now she sat down. "Tired?" he asked. "Not the least," she said, "but I find I play the last nine better if I sit here a few minutes and get the first nine out of my mind.... Had you any friends on the _Lusitania_?" She asked the question suddenly. "Yes," he said. "If I were a man--" "If you were a man--?" he repeated after her. "I'd enlist. I wouldn't wait for this country to go to war. I'd go across. A good many boys have gone, haven't they? I'd go across and be an aviator--or anything they'd let me be...." "For the Allies? I took it for granted you would be on the other side of the fence." "Pro-German!" Her eyes flashed. "I leave that for Father and his cronies. I believe they _celebrated_ last night--actually. My mother wasn't German," she said. Potter knew Mrs. von Essen had died two years before. "_I know Germans_," she said, presently. "I ought to; I've lived among them all my life.... Sometimes I think the whole race is a button short." Potter was to learn that in her vocabulary "a button short" meant not quite complete mentally. "I like some of them, and I'd even trust some of them, but most of them are arrogant _beasts_.... I've read their books," she said. "Dad has a lot of them. People used to think they were nice, slow, harmless, fat, good-natured. Maybe some of them are. But I believe that's what the German government _wanted_ the world to think." These were unusual words to hear falling from a girl's lips. She had been _thinking_. Perhaps that had happened in her life which made her think. "Will we declare war?" she asked, in her sudden way. "Last night I was sure we would. To-day I'm almost as sure we won't."