Right Ho, Jeeves

thing,” I said, “I’ve heard all about your little dust-up So those wedding bells are not going to ring out, what?”
    “No.”
    “Definitely over, is it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, if you want my opinion, I think that’s a bit of goose for you, Angela, old girl. I think you’re extremely well out of it. It’s a mystery to me how you stood this Glossop so long. Take him for all in all, he ranks very low down among the wines and spirits. A washout, I should describe him as. A frightful oik, and a mass of side to boot. I’d pity the girl who was linked for life to a bargee like Tuppy Glossop.”
    And I emitted a hard laugh—one of the sneering kind.
    “I always thought you were such friends,” said Angela.
    I let go another hard one, with a bit more top spin on it than the first time:
    “Friends? Absolutely not. One was civil, of course, when one met the fellow, but it would be absurd to say one was a friend of his. A club acquaintance, and a mere one at that. And then one was at school with the man.”
    “At Eton?”
    “Good heavens, no. We wouldn’t have a fellow like that at Eton. At a kid’s school before I went there. A grubby little brute he was, I recollect. Covered with ink and mire generally, washing only on alternate Thursdays. In short, a notable outsider, shunned by all.”
    I paused. I was more than a bit perturbed. Apart from the agony of having to talk in this fashion of one who, except when he was looping back rings and causing me to plunge into swimming baths in correct evening costume, had always been a very dear and esteemed crony, I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Business was not resulting. Staring into the bushes without a yip, she appeared to be bearing these slurs and innuendos of mine with an easy calm.
    I had another pop at it:
    “‘Uncouth’ about sums it up. I doubt if I’ve ever seen an uncouther kid than this Glossop. Ask anyone who knew him in those days to describe him in a word, and the word they will use is ‘uncouth’. And he’s just the same today. It’s the old story. The boy is the father of the man.”
    She appeared not to have heard.
    “The boy,” I repeated, not wishing her to miss that one, “is the father of the man.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I’m talking about this Glossop.”
    “I thought you said something about somebody’s father.”
    “I said the boy was the father of the man.”
    “What boy?”
    “The boy Glossop.”
    “He hasn’t got a father.”
    “I never said he had. I said he was the father of the boy—or, rather, of the man.”
    “What man?”
    I saw that the conversation had reached a point where, unless care was taken, we should be muddled.
    “The point I am trying to make,” I said, “is that the boy Glossop is the father of the man Glossop. In other words, each loathsome fault and blemish that led the boy Glossop to be frowned upon by his fellows is present in the man Glossop, and causes him—I am speaking now of the man Glossop—to be a hissing and a byword at places hike the Drones, where a certain standard of decency is demanded from the inmates. Ask anyone at the Drones, and they will tell you that it was a black day for the dear old club when this chap Glossop somehow wriggled into the list of members. Here you will find a man who dislikes his face; there one who could stand his face if it wasn’t for his habits. But the universal consensus of opinion is that the fellow is a bounder and a tick, and that the moment he showed signs of wanting to get into the place he should have been met with a firm _nolle prosequi_ and heartily blackballed.”
    I had to pause again here, partly in order to take in a spot of breath, and partly to wrestle with the almost physical torture of saying these frightful things about poor old Tuppy.
    “There are some chaps,” I resumed, forcing myself once more to the nauseous task, “who, in spite of looking as if they had slept in their clothes, can get by quite nicely because they are amiable and suave. There are others who, for all that they excite adverse comment by being fat and uncouth, find themselves on the credit side of the ledger owing to their wit and sparkling humour. But this Glossop, I regret to say, falls into neither class. In addition to looking like one of those things that come out of hollow trees, he is universally admitted to be a dumb brick of the first water. No soul. No conversation. In short, any girl who, having been rash enough to get