Much Obliged, Jeeves

signing on the dotted line with Florence I had made the boner of a lifetime. Just now my last doubts were dispelled.’
    ‘What happened just now?’
    ‘She rubbed the back of my neck. My interview with Florence, coming on top of that ghastly Chamber of Commerce lunch, had given me a splitting headache, and she rubbed the back of my neck. Then I knew. As those soft fingers touched my skin like dainty butterflies hovering over a flower -‘
    ‘Right ho.’
    ‘It was a revelation, Bertie. I knew that I had come to journey’s end. I said to myself “This is a good thing. Push it along”. I turned. I grasped her hand. I gazed into her eyes. She gazed into mine. I told her I loved her. She said so she did me. She fell into my arms. I grabbed her. We stood murmuring endearments, and for a while everything was fine. Couldn’t have been better. Then a thought struck me. There was a snag. You’ve probably spotted it.’
    ‘Florence?’
    ‘Exactly. Bossy though she is, plainspoken though she may be when anything displeases her, and I wish you could have heard her after that Chamber of Commerce lunch, I am still engaged to her. And while girls can break engagements till the cows come home, men can’t.’
    I followed his train of thought. It was evident that he, like me, aimed at being a preux chevalier, and you simply can’t be preux or anything like it if you go about the place getting betrothed and then telling the party of the second part it’s all off. It seemed to me that the snag which had raised its ugly head was one of formidable — you might say king-size — dimensions, well calculated to make the current of whatever he proposed to do about it turn awry and lose the name of action. But when I put this to him with a sympathetic tremor in my voice, and I’m not sure I didn’t clasp his hand, he surprised me by chuckling like a leaky radiator.
    ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘It would, I admit, appear to be a tricky situation, but I can handle it. I’m going to get Florence to break the engagement.’
    He spoke with such a gay, confident ring in his voice, so like the old ancestor predicting what she was going to do to L. P. Runkle in the playing-on-a-stringed-instrument-line, that I was loth, if that’s the word I want, to say anything to depress him, but the question had to be asked.
    ‘How? ‘ I said, asking it.
    ‘Quite simple. We agreed, I think, that she has no use for a loser. I propose to lose this election.’
    Well, it was a thought of course, and I was in complete agreement with his supposition that if the McCorkadale nosed ahead of him in the voting, Florence would in all probability hand him the pink slip, but where it seemed to me that the current went awry was that he had no means of knowing that the electorate would put him in second place. Of course voters are like aunts, you never know what they will be up to from one day to the next, but it was a thing you couldn’t count on. I mentioned this to him, and he repeated his impersonation of a leaky radiator.
    ‘Don’t you worry, Bertie. I have the situation well in hand. Something happened in a dark corner of the Town Hall after lunch which justifies my confidence.’
    ‘What happened in a dark corner of the Town Hall after lunch?’
    ‘Well, the first thing that happened after lunch was that Florence got hold of me and became extremely personal. It was then that I realized that it would be the act of a fathead to marry her.’
    I nodded adhesion to this sentiment. That time when she had broken her engagement with me my spirits had soared and I had gone about singing like a relieved nightingale.
    One thing rather puzzled me and seemed to call for explanatory notes.
    ‘Why did Florence draw you into a dark corner when planning to become personal? ‘ I asked. ‘I wouldn’t have credited her with so much tact and consideration. As a rule, when she’s telling people what she thinks of them, an audience seems to stimulate her. I recall one occasion when she ticked me off in the presence of seventeen Girl Guides, all listening with their ears flapping, and she had never spoken more fluently.’
    He put me straight on the point I had raised. He said he had misled me.
    ‘It wasn’t Florence who drew me into the dark corner, it was Bingley.’
    ‘Bingley?’
    ‘A fellow who worked for me once.’
    ‘He worked for me once.’
    ‘Really? It’s a small world, isn’t it.’
    ‘Pretty small. Did you know he’d come into