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June 7, 2017 - July 18, 2021
He always looked to me as if Nature had really intended to make two police sergeants and had forgotten to split them up.
The young squire setting the lower orders at their ease.
So, in lieu of conversation, I punched him in the tummy and made a dash for the open spaces.
The fleshy or corporeal Wooster was anticipating the binge with pleasure, but his spiritual side rather recoiled a bit.
‘Thank you, Jeeves. There will be a slight testimonial of my appreciation wedged into the envelope.’ ‘Extremely generous of you, sir.’
And, snatching up a carving knife which he appeared to have placed on the mantelpiece with a sort of idea that you never knew when these things may not come in useful, he came bounding up the stairs.
There is nothing like a quiet cigarette for soothing the system. For some moments I puffed luxuriously, and my nerves, which had been sticking out of my body an inch long and curled at the ends, gradually slipped into place again. I felt restored and invigorated and in a mood for conversation.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.’
The young gentleman, when in his present frame of mind, is always extremely exigent.’
I confess that I would like to see old Glossop shinning up something with a bilious bird after him.’
The whole appeared to be proceeding from the drawing-room, and, except for one time when I was sauntering in Hyde Park and suddenly found myself mixed up in a Community Singing, I’ve never heard anything like it.
And his face, I noted, was as black as the ace of spades.
The affection which her ladyship felt for Sir Roderick was instantaneously swept away on the tidal wave of injured mother love.’
My dudgeon melted. We Woosters are human, and the spectacle of so much anguish in a moderately-sized room was too much for me. I
‘Then, as there is a vacancy in your establishment, sir, I wonder if you would consider it a liberty if I were to offer my services?’
His whole attitude recalled irresistibly to the mind that of some assiduous hound who will persist in laying a dead rat on the drawing-room carpet, though repeatedly apprised by word and gesture that the market for same is sluggish or even non-existent.
He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled,
No premonition of an impending doom, however, cast a cloud on my serenity as I buzzed in.
What had caused me to take up the one that had been leaning against a seventeenth-century chair, I cannot say, unless it was the primeval instinct which makes a man without an umbrella reach out for the nearest one in sight, like a flower groping towards the sun.
‘It is difficult to hazard a conjecture, sir.’
May greenfly attack his roses. May his cook get tight on the night of the big dinner-party. May all his hens get the staggers.’
Even across the room one could see that, when it came to self-confidence, Mussolini could have taken his correspondence course.
