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The whole situation seemed to me essentially one of those where you just clench the hands and roll the eyes mutely up to heaven and then start a new life and try to forget.
Unfortunately, however, if there was one thing circumstances weren’t, it was different from what they were,
The more I thought of what lay before me at these bally Towers, the bowed-downer did the heart become.
Prismatic is the only word for those frightful tweeds and, oddly enough, the spectacle of them had the effect of steadying my nerves. They gave me the feeling that nothing mattered.
One so frequently finds in girls a disinclination to stick to the important subject.
“Harold Pinker? Old Stinker Pinker? Great Scott!
It just shows you how true it is that one-half of the world doesn’t know how the other three-quarters lives.
The evening, I remember, was one of perfect tranquillity, featuring a sort of serene peace. Which just shows you.
We Woosters are pretty quick. I don’t suppose it was more than a couple of minutes before I figured out what she meant.
You see before you, Jeeves, a toad beneath the harrow.” “Yes, sir. The trousers perhaps a quarter of an inch higher, sir. One aims at the carelessly graceful break over the instep. It is a matter of the nicest adjustment.” “Like that?” “Admirable, sir.” I sighed. “There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself ‘Do trousers matter?’.” “The mood will pass, sir.” “I don’t see why it should.
“Well, listen. You could easily engage her in a sort of friendly romp, if you know what I mean, in the course of which it would be simple to…well, something in the nature of a jocular embrace…” I checked him sharply. There are limits, and we Woosters recognize them. “Gussie, are you suggesting that I prod Stiffy’s legs?” “Yes.” “Well, I’m not going to.” “Why not?” “We need not delve into my reasons,” I said, stiffly. “Suffice it that the shot is not on the board.”
He sighed and broke the shepherdess, and we moved to the door.
I felt a trifle boneless.
I was pursing my lips dubiously. “I can see it as an idea. But there seems to me to be one fatal snag — viz. that we don’t know.” “Yes, that’s true.” She rose. “Oh, well, it was just a random thought.
As the fellow said, better a dinner of herbs when you’re all buddies together than a regular blow-out when you’re not,
Because he is a butterfly who toys with women’s hearts and throws them away like soiled gloves.” “Right ho.” I hadn’t had a notion that that was what butterflies did. Most interesting.
Owing to the fact that the shock had caused my tongue to get tangled up with my tonsils, inducing an unpleasant choking sensation, I found myself momentarily incapable of speech.
Presently I was aware that Jeeves was with me. I hadn’t heard him come in, but you often don’t with Jeeves. He just streams silently from spot A to spot B, like some gas.
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People.
In other words, what had promised to be a decisive blow had turned out to be merely what Jeeves would call a gesture.
It was a serious disaster, of course, and one which might well have caused a lesser man to feel that it was no use going on struggling. But the whole point about the Woosters, as I have had occasion to remark before, is that they are not lesser men. They keep their heads. They think quickly, and they act quickly. Napoleon was the same.
Bertram Wooster is a man who knows when and when not to be among those present.
had I not experienced a head-on collision with a solid body which happened to be entering at the moment. I remember thinking, as we twined our arms about each other, that at Totleigh Towers, if it wasn’t one thing, it was bound to be something else.
“What is this joint?” she was demanding heatedly. “A loony-bin? Has everybody gone crazy? First I meet Spink-Bottle racing along the corridor like a mustang. Then you try to walk through me as if I were thistledown. And now the gentleman in the burnous has started tickling my ankle — a thing that hasn’t happened to me since the York and Ainsty Hunt Ball of the year nineteen-twenty-one.”
“Well, I’ll be-” Here she paused — fortunately, perhaps, for she is a woman who, when strongly moved, sometimes has a tendency to forget that she is no longer in the hunting-field, and the verb, had she given it utterance, might have proved a bit too fruity for mixed company.
Aunt Dahlia drew a deep breath. A sort of Soul’s Awakening look had come into her face. “Good old blackmail! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall. It works like magic in an emergency.
Nothing can ever render the experience of being treed on top of a chest of drawers by an Aberdeen terrier pleasant, but it seemed to me that the least you can expect on such an occasion is that the animal will meet you half-way and not drop salt into the wound by looking at you as if he were asking if you were saved.
Stiffy, as a rule, is a girl who moves jauntily from spot to spot — youthful elasticity is, I believe, the expression — but she entered now with a slow and dragging step like a Volga boatman.
The manner in which he now tripped over a rug and cannoned into an occasional table, upsetting it with all the old thoroughness, showed me that at heart he still remained the same galumphing man with two left feet, who had always been constitutionally incapable of walking through the great Gobi desert without knocking something over.
“Stiffy,” he said, lowering his voice, “don’t look now, but is there something on top of that chest of drawers?” “Eh? Oh, yes, that’s Bertie Wooster.” “Oh, it is?” said Stinker, brightening visibly. “I wasn’t quite sure.
“What ho. Stinker.” “Hullo, Bertie.” “Long time since we met.” “It is a bit, isn’t it?” “I hear you’re a curate now.” “Yes, that’s right.” “How are the souls?” “Oh, fine, thanks.”
In the absence of these food stuffs, we were thrown back a good deal on straight staring, and this always tends to embarrass.
And I rang the bell and asked Butterfield to bring me a glass of orange juice.” I started. “Orange juice?” “I wanted picking up.” “But orange juice? At such a time?” “It was what I felt I needed.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Oh, well,” I said. Just another proof, of course, of what I often say — that it takes all sorts to make a world.
“What sort of sound?” “The sound of stealthy footsteps, sir.” “Someone stepping stealthily, as it were?” “Precisely, sir.
“Get out of here, you foul Spink-Bottle,” she said curtly. “We’re in conference.
“Bertie,” said Aunt Dahlia, “I am only a weak woman, but if you won’t tread on this insect and throw the remains outside, I shall have to see what I can do. The most tremendous issues hanging in the balance…Our plan of action still to be decided on…Every second of priceless importance…and he comes in here, telling us the story of his life. Spink-Bottle, you ghastly goggle-eyed piece of gorgonzola, will you hop it or will you not?”
“You don’t mean you have an idea?” “Yes, sir.” “But you told me just now you hadn’t.” “Yes, sir. But since then I have been giving the matter some thought, and am now in a position to say ‘Eureka!’” “Say what?” “Eureka, sir. Like Archimedes.” “Did he say Eureka? I thought it was Shakespeare.” “No, sir. Archimedes.
