Young Men in Spats by P. G. Wodehouse Page B

year.’
    â€˜Barmy!’
    â€˜Pongo!’
    They clasped hands. Tried in the furnace, their friendship had emerged strong and true. Cyril Fotheringay-Phipps and Reginald Twistleton-Twistleton were themselves again.

3 TROUBLE DOWN AT TUDSLEIGH
    TWO EGGS AND a couple of Beans were having a leisurely spot in the smoking-room of the Drones Club, when a Crumpet came in and asked if anybody present wished to buy a practically new copy of Tennyson’s poems. His manner, as he spoke, suggested that he had little hope that business would result. Nor did it. The two Beans and one of the Eggs said No. The other Egg merely gave a short, sardonic laugh.
    The Crumpet hastened to put himself right with the Company.
    â€˜It isn’t mine. It belongs to Freddie Widgeon.’
    The senior of the two Beans drew his breath in sharply, genuinely shocked.
    â€˜You aren’t telling us Freddie Widgeon bought a Tennyson?’
    The junior Bean said that this confirmed a suspicion which had long been stealing over him. Poor old Freddie was breaking up.
    â€˜Not at all,’ said the Crumpet. ‘He had the most excellent motives. The whole thing was a strategic move, and in my opinion a jolly fine strategic move. He did it to boost his stock with the girl.’
    â€˜What girl?’
    â€˜April Carroway. She lived at a place called Tudsleigh down in Worcestershire. Freddie went there for the fishing, and the day he left London he happened to run into his uncle, Lord Blicester, and the latter, learning that he was to be in those parts, told him on no account to omit to look in at Tudsleigh Court and slap his old friend, Lady Carroway, on the back. So Freddie called there on the afternoon of his arrival, to get the thing over: and as he was passing through the garden on his way out he suddenly heard a girl’s voice proceeding from the interior of a summer-house. And so musical was it that he edged a bit closer and shot a glance through the window. And, as he did so, he reeled and came within a toucher of falling.’
    From where he stood he could see the girl plainly, and she was, he tells me, the absolute ultimate word, the last bubbling cry. She could not have looked better to him if he had drawn up the specifications personally. He was stunned. He had had no idea that there was anything like this on the premises. There and then he abandoned his scheme of spending the next two weeks fishing: for day by day in every way, he realized, he must haunt Tudsleigh Court from now on like a resident spectre.
    He had now recovered sufficiently for his senses to function once more, and he gathered that what the girl was doing was reading some species of poetry aloud to a small, grave female kid with green eyes and turned-up nose who sat at her side. And the idea came to him that it would be a pretty sound scheme if he could find out what this bilge was. For, of course, when it comes to wooing, it’s simply half the battle to get a line on the adored object’s favourite literature. Ascertain what it is and mug it up and decant an excerpt or two in her presence, and before youcan say ‘What ho!’ she is looking on you as a kindred soul and is all over you.
    And it was at this point that he had a nice little slice of luck. The girl suddenly stopped reading: and, placing the volume face-down on her lap, sat gazing dreamily nor’-nor’-east for a space, as I believe girls frequently do when they strike a particularly juicy bit half-way through a poem. And the next moment Freddie was hareing off to the local post-office to wire to London for a
Collected Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
He was rather relieved, he tells me, because, girls being what they are, it might quite easily have been Shelley or even Browning.
    Well, Freddie lost no time in putting into operation his scheme of becoming the leading pest at Tudsleigh Court. On the following afternoon he called there again, met Lady Carroway once more, and was