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She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose.
'If you would drink this, sir,' he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince. 'It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester Sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening.'
If you give them a what's-its-name, they take a thingummy.
I felt as if I had stepped on the place where the last stair ought to have been, but wasn't.
You may look on it as a test, Bertie. If you have the resource and courage to carry this thing through, I will take it as evidence that you are not the vapid and shiftless person most people think you.
It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away.
'You know, Jeeves, you're by way of being rather a topper.' 'I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir.'
I happened to be looking at Florence's profile at the moment, and at this juncture she swung round and gave me a look that went right through me like a knife. Uncle Willoughby meandered back to the library, and there was a silence that you could have dug bits out of with a spoon.
She was rather like one of those innocent-tasting American drinks which creep imperceptibly into your system so that, before you know what you're doing, you're starting out to reform the world by force if necessary and pausing on your way to tell the large man in the corner that, if he looks at you like that, you will knock his head off.
One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.
If I had half Jeeves's brain I should have a stab at being Prime Minister or something.
I'M not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare – or, if not, it's some equally brainy bird – who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.
I bar practical jokes before breakfast. 'You know perfectly well there's no one waiting for me in the sitting-room. How could there be when it's barely ten o'clock yet?'
She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.
England is a jolly sight too small for anyone to live in with Aunt Agatha, if she's really on the warpath.
Listen to me, old thing: this is the first time in my life that I've had a real chance to yield to the temptations of a great city. What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?
Jeeves had projected himself in from the dining-room and materialised on the rug. Lady Malvern tried to freeze him with a look, but you can't do that sort of thing to Jeeves. He is look-proof.
It was one of those jolly, peaceful mornings that make a chappie wish he'd got a soul or something,
I felt rather like Lot's friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain.
For the first time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish's.
Somehow it was brought home to me that she didn't like Englishmen, and that if she had had to meet an Englishman I was the one she'd have chosen last.
And there in a nutshell you have Charles Edward Biffen. As vague and woollen-headed a blighter as ever bit a sandwich. Goodness knows – and my Aunt Agatha will bear me out in this – I'm no mastermind myself; but compared with Biffy I'm one of the great thinkers of all time.
'Last year,' said Biffy, 'I buzzed over to Canada to do a bit of salmon fishing.' I ordered another. If this was going to be a fish-story, I needed stimulants.
I should imagine a fellow would feel much the same if he happened to be strolling through the jungle with a boyhood chum and met a tigress or a jaguar, or what not, and managed to shin up a tree and looked down and saw the friend of his youth vanishing into the undergrowth in the animal's slavering jaws. A sort of profound, prayerful relief, if you know what I mean, blended at the same time with a pang of pity.
Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.
'The trouble is there isn't any insanity in my family.' 'None?' It seemed to me almost incredible that a fellow could be such a perfect chump as dear old Biffy without a bit of assistance.
If I might make the suggestion, sir, I should not jerk the steering-wheel with quite such suddenness. We very nearly collided with that omnibus.'
Professor Pringle was a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-lookingish cove with an eye like a haddock, while Mrs Pringle's aspect was that of one who had had bad news round about the year 1900 and never really got over it.
Honoria Glossop has a voice like a lion tamer making some authoritative announcement to one of the troupe,
It had been the identical look which I had observed in the eye of Honoria Glossop in the days immediately preceding our engagement – the look of a tigress that has marked down its prey.
'What's to be done, Jeeves?' 'We must think, sir.' 'You think. I haven't the machinery.'
Many a time I've lunched with him and found him perfectly chirpy up to the fish, only to have him turn blue on me well before the cheese.
You may say what you like against Bingo, but nobody has ever found him a depressing host. Why, many a time in the days of his bachelorhood I've known him to start throwing bread before the soup course.
Considerable latitude of choice was given to the singers in the matter of key, and there was little of what I might call cooperative effort. Each child went on till she had reached the end, then stopped and waited for the stragglers to come up.
