found the other. Nobody
would think of looking there a second time, and it was improbable that
Mr. Outwood really would have the chimneys swept, as he had said. The
odds were that he had forgotten about it already.

Psmith went to the bathroom to wash his hands again, with the feeling
that he had done a good day's work.

23

ON THE TRAIL AGAIN

The most massive minds are apt to forget things at times. The most
adroit plotters make their little mistakes. Psmith was no exception to
the rule. He made the mistake of not telling Mike of the afternoon's
happenings.

It was not altogether forgetfulness. Psmith was one of those people who
like to carry through their operations entirely by themselves. Where
there is only one in a secret, the secret is more liable to remain
unrevealed. There was nothing, he thought, to be gained from telling
Mike. He forgot what the consequences might be if he did not.

So Psmith kept his own counsel, with the result that Mike went over to
school on the Monday morning in gym shoes.

Edmund, summoned from the hinterland of the house to give his opinion
why only one of Mike's shoes was to be found, had no views on the
subject. He seemed to look on it as one of these things which no fellow
can understand.

"'Ere's one of 'em, Mr. Jackson," he said, as if he hoped that Mike
might be satisfied with a compromise.

"One? What's the good of that, Edmund, you chump? I can't go over to
school in one shoe."

Edmund turned this over in his mind, and then said, "No, sir," as much
as to say, "I may have lost a shoe, but, thank goodness, I can still
understand sound reasoning."

"Well, what am I to do? Where _is_ the other shoe?"

"Don't know, Mr. Jackson," replied Edmund to both questions.

"Well, I mean ... Oh, dash it, there's the bell." And Mike sprinted off
in the gym shoes he stood in.

It is only a deviation from those ordinary rules of school life, which
one observes naturally and without thinking, that enables one to realize
how strong public-school prejudices really are. At a school, for
instance, where the regulations say that coats only of black or dark
blue are to be worn, a boy who appears one day in even the most
respectable and unostentatious brown finds himself looked on with a
mixture of awe and repulsion, which would be excessive if he had
sandbagged the headmaster. So in the case of shoes. School rules decree
that a boy shall go to his form room in shoes. There is n