Much Obliged, Jeeves

moment about to rhyme June with moon, yet gave the impression, as Esmond did, of being able, if he cared to, to fell an ox with a single blow. I don’t know if he had ever actually done this, for one so seldom meets an ox, but in his undergraduate days he had felled people right and left, having represented the University in the ring as a heavyweight a matter of three years. He may have included oxen among his victims.
    ‘You go through hell,’ he said, the map still clouded as he recalled the past. ‘I had to sit in a room where you could hardly breathe because it was as crowded as the Black Hole of Calcutta and listen to addresses of welcome till midnight. After that I went about making speeches.’
    ‘Well, why aren’t you down there, making speeches, now? Have they given you a day off?’
    ‘I came up to get a secretary.’
    ‘Surely you didn’t go there without one?’
    ‘No, I had one all right, but my fiancee fired her. They had some sort of disagreement.’
    I had pursed the lips a goodish bit when he had told me about his fiancee and the cocktails, and I pursed them to an even greater extent now. The more I heard of this girl he had got engaged to, the less I liked the sound of her. I was thinking how well she would get on with Florence Craye if they happened to meet. Twin souls, I mean to say, each what a housemaid I used to know would have called an overbearing dishpot.
    I didn’t say so, of course. There is a time to call someone an overbearing dishpot, and a time not to. Criticism of the girl he loved might be taken in ill part, as the expression is, and you don’t want an exOxford boxing Blue taking things in ill part with you.
    ‘Have you anyone in mind? ‘ I asked. ‘Or are you just going to a secretary bin, accepting what they have in stock?’
    ‘I’m hoping to get hold of an American girl I saw something of before I left London. I was sharing a flat with Boko Fittleworth when he was writing a novel, and she came every day and worked with him. Boko dictates his stuff, and he said she was tops as a shorthand typist. I have her address, but I don’t know if she’s still there. I’m going round there after lunch. Her name’s Magnolia Glendennon.’
    ‘It can’t be.’
    ‘Why not? ‘
    ‘Nobody could have a name like Magnolia.’
    ‘They could if they came from South Carolina, as she did. In the southern states of America you can’t throw a brick without hitting a Magnolia. But I was telling you about this business of standing for Parliament. First, of course, you have to get the nomination.’
    ‘How did you manage that?’
    ‘My fiancee fixed it. She knows one of the Cabinet ministers, and he pulled strings. A man named Filmer.’
    ‘Not A. B. Filmer?’
    ‘That’s right. Is he a friend of yours? ‘
    ‘I wouldn’t say exactly a friend. I came to know him slightly owing to being chased with him on to the roof of a sort of summerhouse by an angry swan. This drew us rather close together for the moment, but we never became really chummy.’
    ‘Where was this?’
    ‘On an island on the lake at my Aunt Agatha’s place at Steeple Bumpleigh. Living at Steeple Bumpleigh, you’ve probably been there.’
    He looked at me with a wild surmise, much as those soldiers Jeeves has told me about looked on each other when on a peak in Darien, wherever that is.
    ‘Is Lady Worpledon your aunt?’
    ‘And how.’
    ‘She’s never mentioned it.’
    ‘She wouldn’t. Her impulse would be to hush it up.’
    ‘Then, good Lord, she must be your cousin.’
    ‘No, my aunt. You can’t be both.’
    ‘I mean Florence. Florence Craye, my fiancee.’
    It was a shock, I don’t mind telling you, and if I hadn’t been seated I would probably have reeled. Though I ought not to have been so surprised. Florence was one of those girls who are always getting engaged to someone, first teaming up with Stilton Cheesewright, then me, and finally Percy Gorringe, who was dramatizing her novel Spindrift. The play, by the way, had recently been presented to the public at the Duke of York’s theatre and had laid an instantaneous egg, coming off on the following Saturday. One of the critics said he had perhaps seen it at a disadvantage because when he saw it the curtain was up. I had wondered a good deal what effect this had had on Florence’s haughty spirit
    . ‘You’re engaged to Florence?’ I yipped, looking at him with a wild surmise.
    ‘Yes. Didn’t you know?’
    ‘Nobody tells me anything.