Jeeves in the Offing

me half-way.’
‘Turned you down, did she?’
‘Yes, thank goodness ‘
‘Why thank goodness? She’s a one-girl beauty chorus ‘
‘She doesn’t try the eyes, I agree.’
‘A pippin, if ever there was one.’
‘Very true, but is being a pippin everything? What price the soul?’
‘Isn’t her soul like mother makes?’
‘Far from it. Much below par. What I could tell you … But no, let it go Painful subj.’
I had been about to mention fifty-seven or so of the reasons why the prudent operator, if he valued his peace of mind, deemed it best to stay well away from the red-headed menace under advisement, but realized that at a moment when I was wanting to get back to the marmalade it would occupy too much time. It will be enough to say that I had long since come out of the ether and was fully cognizant of the fact that in declining to fall in with my suggestion that we should start rounding up clergymen and bridesmaids, the beasel had rendered me a signal service, and I’ll tell you why.
Aunt Dahlia, describing this young blister as a one-girl beauty chorus, had called her shots perfectly correctly. Her outer crust was indeed of a nature to cause those beholding it to rock back on their heels with a startled whistle But while equipped with eyes like twin stars, hair ruddier than the cherry, oomph, espieglene and all the fixings, B. Wickham had also the disposition and general outlook on life of a ticking bomb In her society you always had the uneasy feeling that something was likely to go off at any moment with a pop. You never knew what she was going to do next or into what murky depths of soup she would carelessly plunge you.
‘Miss Wickham, sir,’ Jeeves had once said to me warningly at the time when the fever was at its height, ‘lacks seriousness She is volatile and frivolous. I would always hesitate to recommend as a life partner a young lady with quite such a vivid shade of red hair.’
His judgment was sound I have already mentioned how with her subtle wiles this girl had induced me to sneak into Sir Roderick Glossop’s sleeping apartment and apply the darning needle to his hot-water bottle, and that was comparatively mild going for her. In a word, Roberta, daughter of the late Sir Cuthbert and Lady Wickham of Skeldings Hall, Herts, was pure dynamite and better kept at a distance by all those who aimed at leading the peaceful life The prospect of being immured with her in the same house, with all the facilities a country-house affords an enterprising girl for landing her nearest and dearest in the mulligatawny, made me singularly dubious about the shape of things to come.
And I was tottering under this blow when the old relative administered another, and it was a haymaker.
‘And there’s Aubrey Upjohn and his stepdaughter Phyllis Mills,’ she said That’s the lot What’s the matter with you? Got asthma?’
I took her to be alluding to the sharp gasp which had escaped my lips, and I must confess that it had come out not unlike the last words of a dying duck. But I felt perfectly justified in gasping A weaker man would have howled like a banshee. There floated into my mind something Kipper Herring had once said to me. ‘You know, Bertie,’ he had said, in philosophical mood, ‘we have much to be thankful for in this life of ours, you and I However rough the going, there is one sustaining thought to which we can hold. The storm clouds may lower and the horizon grow dark, we may get a nail in our shoe and be caught in the rain without an umbrella, we may come down to breakfast and find that someone else has taken the brown egg, but at least we have the consolation of knowing that we shall never see Aubrey Gawd-help-us Upjohn again. Always remember this in times of despondency,’ he said, and I always had. And now here the bounder was, bobbing up right in my midst. Enough to make the stoutest-hearted go into his dying-duck routine.
‘Aubrey Upjohn?’ I quavered. ‘You mean my Aubrey Upjohn?’
‘That’s the one. Soon after you made your escape from his chain gang he married Jane Mills, a friend of mine with a colossal amount of money. She died, leaving a daughter. I’m the daughter’s godmother. Upjohn’s retired now and going in for politics. The hot tip is that the boys in the back room are going to run him as the Conservative candidate in the Market Snodsbury division at the next by-election. What a thrill it’ll be for you, meeting him again. Or does the prospect scare