Cobb's Bill-of-Fare

I can understand why so very few of these ultra-athletic college girls marry off early. A man instinctively is drawn to the clinging-vine type of female. If there is any sturdy oak round the place he wants to be it. But what I cannot understand is how these brawny young persons can be the granddaughters and the great granddaughters of those fragile creatures, with wasp waists and tiny feet, who lived back in the Early Victorian period and suffered from megrims and vapors. I'll venture that none of this generation ever had a vapor in her life; and as for megrims, she wouldn't know one if she met it in the big road. She may be muscle-bound and throw a splint sometimes, or get the Charley horse; but megrims are not for her—believe me!

Oh, I've seen them often—the adorable yet brawny creatures, leaping six feet into the air and smacking a defenseless tennis ball with such vigor that it started right off in the general direction of Sioux Falls at the rate of upwards of ninety miles an hour, and coming down flat-footed without having jostled so much as a hairpin out of place. You may worship them, all right enough, but it is safer to do so at long distance.

Suppose you were hooked up for life to a lady champion and you happened to displease her? She'd spank you! Think of being laid face downward firmly across a sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one of those hard catgut rackets! The very suggestion is intolerable to a believer in the supremacy of the formerly sterner sex.

So I have decided not to take up tennis; but the doctor says I need exercise, and I think I will go in for golf, which is a young man's vice and an old man's penance. I have already taken the preliminary steps. I have joined a country club; I have also chosen my caddie. He is a deaf-and-dumb caddie, who has never been known to laugh at anything.

That is why I chose him.