eclining. His only way out would be to slide
off. And he can't slide off, because he wants to be with Miss Bassett.
No, Gussie will have to toe the line, and I shall be saved from a job at
which I confess the soul shuddered. Getting up on a platform and
delivering a short, manly speech to a lot of foul school-kids! Golly,
Jeeves. I've been through that sort of thing once, what? You remember
that time at the girls' school?"

"Very vividly, sir."

"What an ass I made of myself!"

"Certainly I have seen you to better advantage, sir."

"I think you might bring me just one more of those dynamite specials of
yours, Jeeves. This narrow squeak has made me come over all faint."

I suppose it must have taken Aunt Dahlia three hours or so to get back to
Brinkley, because it wasn't till well after lunch that her telegram
arrived. It read like a telegram that had been dispatched in a white-hot
surge of emotion some two minutes after she had read mine.

As follows:

_Am taking legal advice to ascertain whether strangling an idiot nephew
counts as murder. If it doesn't look out for yourself. Consider your
conduct frozen limit. What do you mean by planting your loathsome friends
on me like this? Do you think Brinkley Court is a leper colony or what is
it? Who is this Spink-Bottle? Love. Travers._

I had expected some such initial reaction. I replied in temperate vein:

_Not Bottle. Nottle. Regards. Bertie._

Almost immediately after she had dispatched the above heart cry, Gussie
must have arrived, for it wasn't twenty minutes later when I received the
following:

_Cipher telegram signed by you has reached me here. Runs "Lay off the
sausages. Avoid the ham." Wire key immediately. Fink-Nottle._

I replied:

_Also kidneys. Cheerio. Bertie._

I had staked all on Gussie making a favourable impression on his hostess,
basing my confidence on the fact that he was one of those timid,
obsequious, teacup-passing, thin-bread-and-butter-offering yes-men whom
women of my Aunt Dahlia's type nearly always like at first sight. That I
had not overrated my acumen was proved by her next in order, which, I was
pleased to note, assayed a markedly larger percentage of the milk of
human kindness.

As follows:

_Well, this friend of yours has got here, and I must say that for a
friend of yours he seems less sub-human than I had expected. A bit of a
pop-eyed bleater, but on the whole clean and civil, and certainly most
informative about new