"Children always get the best of it at croquet,--when they know anything
at all," said Imogen Thoresby discontentedly, throwing down her mallet.
"You 'poked' awfully, Etty."

Etty began an indignant denial; unable to endure the double accusation
of being a child,--she, a girl in her fourteenth year,--and of "poking."
But Imogen walked away quite unconcernedly, and Jeannie Hadden followed
her. These two, as nearest in age, were growing intimate. Ginevra was
almost too old,--she was twenty.

They played a four-ball game then; Leslie and Etty against Elinor and
Dakie Thayne. But Elinor declared--laughing, all the same, in her
imperturbably good-natured way--that not only Etty's pokes were against
her, but that Dakie would _not_ croquet Leslie's ball downhill. Nothing
ever really put Elinor Hadden out, the girls said of her, except when
her hair wouldn't go up; and then it was funny to see her. It was a
sunbeam in a snarl, or a snow flurry out of a blue sky. This in
parenthesis, however; it was quite true, as she alleged, that Dakie
Thayne had taken up already that chivalrous attitude toward Leslie
Goldthwaite which would not let him act otherwise than as her loyal
knight, even though opposed to her at croquet.

"You'll have enough of that boy," said Mrs. Linceford, when Leslie came
in, and found her at her window that overlooked the wickets. "There's
nothing like a masculine creature of that age for adoring and
monopolizing a girl two or three years older. He'll make you mend his
gloves, and he'll beg your hair-ribbons for hat-strings; and when you're
not dancing or playing croquet with him, he'll be after you with some
boy-hobby or other, wanting you to sympathize and help. 'I know their
tricks and their manners.'" But she looked amused and kind while she