Those who played in the early afternoon were truly solitary lovers of that curious sport which obliges one to walk much in silence, in a sustained and concentrated attention, in the open country, in a peculiar search for a ball and one's opponent, in a broad horizon, neither feeling heat nor cold, exercising not only the muscles, but even a little--really a little--the intellect. They were great solitaries, who fled from society because they frequented her too much at other times of their day; great solitaries who loved contact with the open air and fields and woods, in contrast with the confined, heavy life they were forced to lead elsewhere; great solitaries who for a secret reason, sad, perhaps, or tragic, but secret and dissembled, now hated man and woman; great solitaries whose age and experience had divorced them from games of love, of vanity, and perhaps of ambition. In fact, the early golfers were the real, keen golfers, and for the most part middle-aged men and women. Among such were the Comte de Buchner, an Austrian diplomat, a pupil of Metternich, who perceived but did not wish to confess the end of the diplomatic legend, the end of a policy made by ambassadors, a septuagenarian who already felt himself dead amongst his ancestors; the Baron de Loewy, from London, of the powerful Loewy bank, who sometimes held in his hand the whole of European finance, a handsome, robust man with white moustaches, full of spirit, who passed hours out of doors at golf, and who came there to find equilibrium for his winter life as a great banker; Madame Lesnoy, a woman of sixty-five, who had made her fortune thirty years ago, and though _une grande bourgeoise_, had married her sons and daughters to the greatest names in European heraldry, and who now had nothing else to do but play golf by day and bridge by night; the Marquis de Cléan, whose wife had been killed two years ago with her lover in an hotel at Montreux, a story which tortured his life of worldly scepticism and over which he dared not feign cynicism; the Contessa di Anagni, of the best society of Rome, who had been loved by a King and had been unable to fix the heart of the volatile sovereign; Max and Ludwig Freytag, for whom Karl Ehbehard, the great doctor, had ordered this exercise, as being excellent to stimulate their weakened temper; the Comtesse Fulvia Gioia, who thus even better preserved her health and mature beauty, like that of sappy, ripe fruit; and so many others who at two and three o'clock deserted their rooms and hotels and directed themselves to the links and shortly afterwards disappeared in every direction--great solitaries, true golfers.