Much Obliged, Jeeves

come out. The whole operation was like taking candy from a kid.’
    There are some stories which fill the man of sensibility with horror, repugnance, abhorrence and disgust. I don’t mean anecdotes like the one Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, told me at the Drones, I am referring to loathsome revelations such as the bit of autobiography
    to which I had just been listening. To say that I felt as if the Wooster soul had been spattered with mud by a passing car would not be putting it at all too strongly. I also felt that nothing was to be gained by continuing this distasteful interview. I had had some idea of going into the possibility of Aunt Agatha reading the contents of the club book and touching on the doom, desolation and despair which must inevitably be my portion if she did, but I saw that it would be fruitless or bootless. The man was without something and pity… ruth, would it be? I know it begins with r… and would simply have given me the horse’s laugh. I was now quite certain that he had murdered his uncle and forged the will. Such a performance to such a man would have been mere routine.
    I turned, accordingly, to the door, but before I got there he stopped me, wanting to know if when coming to stay with Aunt Dahlia I had brought Reggie Jeeves with me. I said I had, and he said he would like to see old Reggie again.
    ‘What a cough drop! ‘ he said mirthfully. The word was strange to me, but weighing it and deciding that it was intended to be a compliment and a tribute to his many gifts, I agreed that Jeeves was in the deepest and truest sense a cough drop.
    ‘Tell Bastable as you go out that if Reggie calls to send him up. But nobody else.’
    ‘Right ho.’
    ‘Good man, Bastable. He places my bets for me. Which reminds me. Have you done as I advised and put a bit on Ma McCorkadale for the Market Snodsbury stakes? No? Do it without fail, Wooster old man. You’ll never regret it. It’ll be like finding money in the street.
    ‘ I wasn’t feeling any too good as I drove away. I have described my heart-bowed-down-ness on approaching the Arnold Abney study door after morning prayers in the days when I was in statu pupillari, as the expression is, and I was equally apprehensive now as I faced the prospect of telling the old ancestor of my failure to deliver the goods in the matter of Bingley. I didn’t suppose that she would give me six of the best, as A. Abney was so prone to do, but she would certainly not hesitate to let me know she was displeased. Aunts as a class are like Napoleon, if it was Napoleon; they expect their orders to be carried out without a hitch and don’t listen to excuses.
    Nor was I mistaken. After lunching at a pub in order to postpone the meeting as long as possible, I returned to the old homestead and made my report, and was unfortunate enough to make it while she was engaged in reading a Rex Stout, — in the hard cover, not a paper-back. When she threw this at me with the accurate aim which years of practice have given her, its sharp edge took me on the tip of the nose, making me blink not a little.
    ‘I might have known you would mess the whole thing up,’ she boomed.
    ‘Not my fault, aged relative,’ I said. ‘I did my best. Than which,’ I added, ‘no man can do more.’
    I thought I had her there, but I was wrong. It was the sort of line which can generally be counted on to soothe the savage breast, but this time it laid an egg. She snorted. Her snorts are not the sniffing snorts snorted by Ma McCorkadale, they resemble more an explosion in the larger type of ammunition dump and send strong men rocking back on their heels as if struck by lightning.
    ‘How do you mean you did your best? You don’t seem to me to have done anything. Did you threaten to have him arrested?’
    ‘No, I didn’t do that.’
    ‘Did you grasp him by the throat and shake him like a rat?’ I admitted that that had not occurred to me.
    ‘In other words, you did absolutely nothing,’ she said, and thinking it over I had to own that she was perfectly right. It’s funny how one doesn’t notice these things at the time. It was only now that I realized that I had let Bingley do all the talking, self offering practically nil in the way of a come-back. I could hardly have made less of a contribution to our conversation if I had been the deaf adder I mentioned earlier.
    She heaved herself up from the chaise longue on which she was reclining. Her manner was peevish. In time, of course, she