She played very aggressively and her serve proved difficult to return.

Hancock was a little discombobulated without Kathleen. I imagine their coach had to rest her to try to make her healthy for districts.

Obviously, what we had wasn't working and the girls adjusted well and enjoyed themselves, which isn't always an easy thing to do when you are losing. We've got four practices before our next game and now we've got a new angle. Change is good.

We beat ourselves with 32 missed serves on the night. The team has a lot of talent and the girls are improving every day, but great passing and hard hitting don't really matter much if a team can't make its serves.

So a dog's value came from the training AND the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines - the particular dogs in their ancestry - and all the information in the file cabinets. Because the files, with their photographs, measurements, notes, charts, cross-references, and scores, told the STORY of the dog - what a MEANT as his father put it.

Almondine

Eventually, she understood the house was keeping a secret from her.

All that winter and all through the spring Almondine had known something was going to happen, but no matter where she looked she couldn’t find it. Sometimes, when she entered a room, there was the feeling that the thing that was going to happen had just been there, and she would stop and pant and peer around while the feeling seeped away as mysteriously as it had arrived. Weeks might pass without a sign, and then a night would come, when, lying nose to tail beneath the window in the kitchen corner, listening to the murmur of conversation and the slosh and clink of dishes being washed, she felt it in the house again and she whisked her tail in long, pensive strokes across the baseboards and silently collected her feet beneath her and waited. When half an hour passed and nothing appeared, she groaned and sighed and rolled onto her back and waited to see if it was somewhere in her sleep.