“What’s the matter now?”
“Lady Constance Keeble?”
“That’s the name. She’s Lord Emsworth’s sister, who lives at a big place up the road. Blandings Castle it’s called. She didn’t seem like she was able to let me out of her sight, and I’ve been with her off and on ever since we landed. I’m visiting at the castle now.”
A deep sigh, like the groan of some great spirit in travail, forced itself from between Mr. Cootes’s lips.
“Well, wouldn’t that jar you!” he demanded of circumambient space. “Of all the lucky ones! getting into the place like that, with the band playing and a red carpet laid down for you to walk on! Gee, if you fell down a well, Liz, you’d come up with the bucket. You’re a human horseshoe, that’s what you are. Say, listen. Lemme-tell-ya-sumf’n. Do you know what I’ve been doing this afternoon? Only trying to edge into the dam’ place myself and getting the air two minutes after I was past the front door.”
“What! You, Ed?”
“Sure. You’re not the only one that’s heard of that collection of ice.”
“Oh, Ed!” Bitter disappointment rang in Miss Peavey’s voice. “If only you could have worked it! Me and you partners again! It hurts to think of it. What was the stuff you pulled to get you in?”
Mr. Cootes so far forgot himself in his agony of spirit as to expectorate disgustedly at a passing frog. And even in this trivial enterprise failure dogged him. He missed the frog, which withdrew into the grass with a cold look of disapproval.
“Me?” said Mr. Cootes. “I thought I’d got it smooth. I’d chummed up with a fellow who had been invited down to the place and had thought it over and decided not to go, so I said to myself what’s the matter with going there instead of him. A gink called McTodd this was, a poet, and none of the folks had ever set eyes on him, except the old man, who’s too short-sighted to see anyone, so . . .”