Cutter had imported the idea of this club. As Cadmus introduced letters into Greece, so had he brought golf to the business men of Shannon. Until then middle-aged citizens accepted the sedentary habits of their years and went down to their graves corpulent and muscleless, developing only a little miserliness toward the last or a few crapulous vices. But now these men, grown bald and gray, who had never spent a surplus nickel nor taken more exercise than healthy invalids, hired caddies for fifty cents an hour, and spent recklessly for golf sticks and especially golf stockings and breeches. And they were to be seen any afternoon stepping springily over these links, whacking balls--for the ninth hole at least--with all the reared-back, straddle-legged, arm-swinging genuflections of enthusiastic youth. Missionaries have spent twenty years in the heart of Africa without accomplishing so much healthful good for the savages there. But in that case the idea of course is not to prolong the life of a savage, but to save his soul. Still, Cutter was a successful missionary in this matter of golf, because the souls of the men in Shannon had long been sufficiently enured to the gospel to be saved, if they could be. As for the women, that was a different matter. Very few people ever worry seriously about the salvation of these milder creatures. Until quite recently they have been so securely preserved, sheltered and possessed that it was actually difficult for a woman to lose her soul by any obvious overt transgression. Even then you could not be sure she had lost it, since she suffered such overwhelming martyrdom for her offense. And we do not know what kind balances may be arranged in the Book of Life for these poor victims of life in the flesh. There was also a different standard for women in the matter of outdoor exercise, even at so recent a date as this of which I write. They might caper adventuresomely in the open as girls, but the idea of a married woman spreading her feet and swinging her club at a ball on the golf links at Shannon was unthinkable. If they wanted the air, let them go out-of-doors; if they wanted exercise, let them go back indoors and do something. So Helen never accompanied her husband to the golf links. She always went in the house and did things that would please him, or at least satisfy him when he came home. They were still living in the house at the end of Wiggs Street. No changes had been made in it, not a stitch had been added to it. It was simply laundered, so to speak, once in so often with a fresh coat of white paint. But it was not so sparsely settled within as it had been when she came there as a bride.