had had a presentiment that a determined
effort would be made to elect me as the goat, and I braced myself to
resist and obstruct.

And as I was about to do so, while I was in the very act of summoning up
all my eloquence to protest that I didn't know how to ride a bike and
couldn't possibly learn in the brief time at my disposal, I'm dashed if
the man didn't go and nip me in the bud.

"Yes, madam, Mr. Wooster would perform the task admirably. He is an
expert cyclist. He has often boasted to me of his triumphs on the wheel."

I hadn't. I hadn't done anything of the sort. It's simply monstrous how
one's words get twisted. All I had ever done was to mention to
him--casually, just as an interesting item of information, one day in New
York when we were watching the six-day bicycle race--that at the age of
fourteen, while spending my holidays with a vicar of sorts who had been
told off to teach me Latin, I had won the Choir Boys' Handicap at the
local school treat.

A different thing from boasting of one's triumphs on the wheel.

I mean, he was a man of the world and must have known that the form of
school treats is never of the hottest. And, if I'm not mistaken, I had
specifically told him that on the occasion referred to I had received
half a lap start and that Willie Punting, the odds-on favourite to whom
the race was expected to be a gift, had been forced to retire, owing to
having pinched his elder brother's machine without asking the elder
brother, and the elder brother coming along just as the pistol went and
giving him one on the side of the head and taking it away from him, thus
rendering him a scratched-at-the-post non-starter. Yet, from the way he
talked, you would have thought I was one of those chaps in sweaters with
medals all over them, whose photographs bob up from time to time in the
illustrated press on the occasion of their having ridden from Hyde Park
Corner to Glasgow in three seconds under the hour, or whatever it is.

And as if this were not bad enough, Tuppy had to shove his oar in.

"That's right," said Tuppy. "Bertie has always been a great cyclist. I
remember at Oxford he used to take all his clothes off on bump-supper
nights and ride around the quad, singing comic songs. Jolly fast he used
to go too."

"Then he can go jolly fast now," said Aunt Dahlia with animation. "He
can't go too fast for me. He may also sing comic songs, if he likes....
And if you wish to take your clothes off, Berti