Much Obliged, Jeeves

again I found myself thinking how well barristers put things.
    The old ancestor, too, appeared — what’s the word beginning with m and meaning less hot under the collar ? Mollified, that’s it. The suggestion that she could not have a nephew capable of being described as a common man mollified her. I don’t say that even now she would have asked Ma McCorkadale to come on a long walking tour with her, but her voice was definitely matier.
    ‘Why do you call him a slug?’ she asked, and the McCorkadale had her answer to that.
    ‘For the same reason that I call a spade a spade, because it is the best way of conveying a verbal image of him. He made me a disgraceful proposition.’
    ‘WHAT? ‘ said Aunt Dahlia rather tactlessly.
    I could understand her being surprised. It was difficult to envisage a man so eager to collect girl friends as to make disgraceful propositions to Mrs. McCorkadale.
    It amazed me that Bingley could have done it. I had never liked him, but I must confess to a certain admiration for his temerity. Our humble heroes, I felt.
    ‘You’re pulling my leg,’ said the aged relative.
    The McCorkadale came back at her briskly.
    ‘I am doing nothing of the kind. I am telling you precisely what occurred. I was in my drawing-room going over the speech I have prepared for the debate tomorrow, when I was interrupted by the incursion of this man. Naturally annoyed, I asked him what his business was, and he said with a most offensive leer that he was Father Christmas bringing me manna in the wilderness and tidings of great joy. I was about to ring the bell to have him shown out, for of course I assumed that he was intoxicated, when he made me this extraordinary proposition. He had contrived to obtain information to the detriment of my opponent, and this he wished to sell to me. He said it would make my victory in the election certain. It would, as he phrased it, he a snip.’
    I stirred on my base. If I hadn’t been afraid I might be overheard, I would have said ‘Ahal ‘ Had circs been other than they were, I would have stepped into the room, tapped the ancestor on the shoulder and said ‘Didn’t I tell you Bingley had information? Perhaps another time you’ll believe me’. But as this would have involved renewing my acquaintance with a woman of whom I had already seen sufficient to last a lifetime, it was not within the sphere of practical politics. I remained, accordingly, where I was, merely hitching my ears up another couple of notches in order not to miss the rest of the dialogue.
    After the ancestor had said ‘For heaven’s sake! ‘ or ‘Gorblimey’ or whatever it was, indicating that her visitor’s story interested her strongly, the McCorkadale resumed. And what she resumed about unquestionably put the frosting on the cake. Words of doom is the only way I can think of to describe the words she spoke as.
    ‘The man, it appeared, was a retired valet, and he belonged to a club for butlers and valets in London, one of the rules of which was that all members were obliged to record in the club book information about their employers. My visitor explained that he had been at one time in the employment of Mr. Winship and had duly recorded a number of the latter’s escapades which if made public, would be certain to make the worst impression on the voters of Market Snodsbury.’
    This surprised me. I hadn’t had a notion that Bingley had ever worked for Ginger. It just shows the truth of the old saying that half the world doesn’t know how the other three-quarters live.
    ‘He then told me without a blush of shame that on his latest visit to London he had purloined this book and now had it in his possession.’
    I gasped with horror. I don’t know why, but the thought that Bingley must have been pinching the thing at the very moment when Jeeves and I were sipping our snootfuls in the next room seemed to make it so particularly poignant. Not that it wouldn’t have been pretty poignant anyway. For years I had been haunted by the fear that the Junior Ganymede club book, with all the dynamite it contained, would get into the wrong hands, and the hands it had got into couldn’t have been more the sort of hands you would have wished it hadn’t. I don’t know if I make myself clear, but what I’m driving at is that if I had been picking a degraded character to get away with that book, Bingley was the last character I would have picked. I remember Jeeves speaking of someone who was fit for