“You are not enjoying your visit, sir?”
“I am not, Jeeves. Have you seen Miss Pringle?”
“Yes, sir. From a distance.”
“The best way to see her. Did you observe her keenly?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did she remind you of anybody?”
“She appeared to me to bear a remarkable likeness to her cousin, Miss Glossop, sir.”
“Her cousin! You don’t mean to say she’s Honoria Glossop’s cousin?”
“Yes, sir. Mrs. Pringle was a Miss Blatherwick—the younger of two sisters, the elder of whom married Sir Roderick Glossop.”
“Great Scott! That accounts for the resemblance.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what a resemblance, Jeeves! She even talks like Miss Glossop.”
“Indeed, sir? I have not yet heard Miss Pringle speak.”
“You have missed little. And what it amounts to, Jeeves, is that, while nothing will induce me to let old Sippy down, I can see that this visit is going to try me high. At a pinch I could stand the prof and wife. I could even make the effort of a lifetime and bear up against Aunt Jane. But to expect a man to mix daily with the girl Heloise—and to do it, what is more, on lemonade, which is all there was to drink at dinner—is to ask too much of him. What shall I do, Jeeves?”
“I think that you should avoid Miss Pringle’s society as much as possible.”
“The same great thought had occurred to me,” I said.
It is all very well, though, to talk airily about avoiding a female’s society; but when you are living in the same house with her and she doesn’t want to avoid you, it takes a bit of doing. It is a peculiar thing in life that the people you most particularly want to edge away from always seem to cluster round like a poultice. I hadn’t been twenty-four hours in the place before I perceived that I was going to see a lot of this pestilence.
She was one of those girls you’re always meeting on the stairs and in passages. I couldn’t go into a room without seeing her drift in a minute later. And if I walked in the garden, she was sure to leap out at me from a laurel bush or the onion bed or something. By about the tenth day I had begun to feel absolutely haunted.
“Jeeves,” I said, “I have begun to feel absolutely haunted.”
“Sir?”
“This woman dogs me. I never seem to get a moment to myself. Old Sippy was supposed to come here to make a study of the Cambridge colleges, and she took me round about fifty-seven this morning. This afternoon I went to sit in the garden, and she popped up through a trap and was in my midst. This evening she cornered me in the morning-room. It’s getting so that when I have a bath I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find her nestling in the soap dish.”
“Extremely trying, sir.”
“Dashed so! Have you any remedy to suggest?”
“Not at the moment, sir. Miss Pringle does appear to be distinctly interested in you, sir. She was asking me questions this morning respecting your mode of life in London.”
“What!”
“Yes, sir.”
I stared at the man in horror. A ghastly thought had struck me. I quivered like an aspen.
At lunch that day a curious thing had happened. We had just finished mangling the cutlets, and I was sitting back in my chair, taking a bit of an easy before being allotted my slab of boiled pudding, when, happening to look up, I caught the girl Heloise’s eye fixed on me in what seemed to me a rather rummy manner. I didn’t think much about it at the time, because boiled pudding is a thing you have to give your undivided attention to if you want to do yourself justice; but now, recalling the episode in the light of Jeeves’s words, the full sinister meaning of the thing seemed to come home to me.
Even at the moment, something about that look had struck me as oddly familiar, and now I suddenly saw why. It had been the identical look which I had observed in the eye of Honoria Glossop in the days immediately preceding our engagement—the look of a tigress that has marked down its prey.
“Jeeves, do you know what I think?”
“Sir?”
I gulped slightly.
“Jeeves,” I said, “listen attentively. I don’t want to give the impression that I consider myself one of those deadly coves who exercise an irresistible fascination over one and all, and can’t meet a girl without wrecking her peace of mind in the first half-minute. As a matter of fact, it’s rather the other way with me, for girls on entering my presence are mostly inclined to give me the raised eyebrow and the twitching upper lip. Nobody, therefore, can say that I am a cove who’s likely to take alarm unnecessarily. You admit that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nevertheless, Jeeves, it is a known scientific fact that there is a particular type of female that does seem strangely attracted to the sort of fellow I am.”
“Very true, sir.”
“I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I’ve got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess. And when a girl comes along who has about twice the regular allowance she too often makes a beeline for me with the love-light in her eyes. I don’t know how to account for it, but it is so.”
“It may be Nature’s provision for maintaining the balance of the species, sir.”
“Very possibly. Anyway, it has happened to me over and over again. It was what happened in the case of Honoria Glossop. She was notoriously one of the brainiest women of her year at Girton and she just gathered me in like a bull pup swallowing a piece of steak.”
“Miss Pringle, I am informed, sir, was an even more brilliant scholar than Miss Glossop.”
“Well, there you are! Jeeves, she looks at me.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I keep meeting her on the stairs and in passages.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“She recommends me books
