The Mating Season

In your walks about London you will sometimes see bent, haggard figures that look as if they had recently been caught in some powerful machinery. They are those fellows who got mixed up with Catsmeat when he was meaning well.

You can't press your suit and another fellow's trousers simultaneously.

On the cue 'five aunts' I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter, but the courage that one brings to them, I pulled myself together.

The only occupant of the more posh saloon bar was a godlike man in a bowler hat with grave, finely chiselled features and a head that stuck out at the back, indicating great brain power. To cut a long story short, Jeeves.

A tall, drooping man, looking as if he has been stuffed in a hurry by an incompetent taxidermist.

In the circles in which I move it is pretty generally recognized that I am a resilient sort of bimbo, and in circumstances where others might crack beneath the strain, may frequently be seen rising on stepping-stones of my dead self to higher things.

I remember once when he and I arrived at a country house where the going threatened to be sticky, Jeeves, as we alighted, murmured in my ear the words 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, sir', and at the time I could make nothing of the crack. Subsequent inquiry, however, revealed that this Roland was one of those knights of the Middle Ages who spent their time wandering to and fro, and that on fetching up one evening at a dump known as the Dark Tower he had scratched the chin a bit dubiously, not liking the look of things.

But dragons are one thing and aunts are another.

I was losing the old pep and…unless the clouds changed their act and started dishing out at an early date a considerably more substantial slab of silver lining than they were coming across with at the moment, I should soon be definitely down among the wines and spirits.

But I say, really, you know, I am an old friend of the family. Why, by Jove, now I remember, there's a photograph of me in the drawing-room. Well, I mean, that shows you!" "If there is," said the policeman. "I've never seen it," said the parlourmaid. I absolutely hated this girl. "You would have seen it if you had done your dusting more conscientiously," I said severely. And I meant it to sting, by Jove! "It is not a parlourmaid's place to dust the drawing-room," she sniffed haughtily. "No," I said bitterly. "It seems to be a parlourmaid's place to lurk about and hang about and - er - waste her time fooling about in the garden with policemen who ought to be busy about their duties elsewhere." "It's a parlourmaid's place to open the front door to visitors. Them that don't come in through windows." I perceived that I was getting the loser's end of the thing.

It was all too plainly her opinion that, if let loose in drawing rooms, I would immediately proceed to create an atmosphere reminiscent of a waterfront saloon when the Fleet is in.

It calls for sophisticated handling. We shall have to think this over." "I've been thinking it over for hours." "Yes, but you've got one of those cheap substitute brains which are never any good. It will be different when a man like me starts giving it the cream of his intellect.