ickens of a time. Can't eat, can't sleep--all for love
of you. And what makes it all so particularly rotten is that it--this
aching heart--can't bring itself up to the scratch and tell you the
position of affairs, because your profile has gone and given it cold
feet. Just as it is about to speak, it catches sight of you sideways, and
words fail it. Silly, of course, but there it is."

I heard her give a gulp, and I saw that her eyes had become moistish.
Drenched irises, if you care to put it that way.

"Lend you a handkerchief?"

"No, thank you. I'm quite all right."

It was more than I could say for myself. My efforts had left me weak. I
don't know if you suffer in the same way, but with me the act of talking
anything in the nature of real mashed potatoes always induces a sort of
prickly sensation and a hideous feeling of shame, together with a marked
starting of the pores.

I remember at my Aunt Agatha's place in Hertfordshire once being put on
the spot and forced to enact the role of King Edward III saying goodbye
to that girl of his, Fair Rosamund, at some sort of pageant in aid of the
Distressed Daughters of the Clergy. It involved some rather warmish
medieval dialogue, I recall, racy of the days when they called a spade a
spade, and by the time the whistle blew, I'll bet no Daughter of the
Clergy was half as distressed as I was. Not a dry stitch.

My reaction now was very similar. It was a highly liquid Bertram who,
hearing his _vis-a-vis_ give a couple of hiccups and start to speak bent
an attentive ear.

"Please don't say any more, Mr. Wooster."

Well, I wasn't going to, of course.

"I understand."

I was glad to hear this.

"Yes, I understand. I won't be so silly as to pretend not to know what
you mean. I suspected this at Cannes, when you used to stand and stare at
me without speaking a word, but with whole volumes in your eyes."

If Angela's shark had bitten me in the leg, I couldn't have leaped more
convulsively. So tensely had I been concentrating on Gussie's interests
that it hadn't so much as crossed my mind that another and an unfortunate
construction could be placed on those words of mine. The persp., already
bedewing my brow, became a regular Niagara.

My whole fate hung upon a woman's word. I mean to say, I couldn't back
out. If a girl thinks a man is proposing to her, and on that
understanding books him up, he can't explain to her that she has got hold
of entirely the wrong end of the