Money for nothing

by P. G. Wodehouse

He felt numbed, just as he had felt numbed in Dublin when what had appeared to be a flock of centipedes with cleated boots had made him the object of their attentions. All the breath had gone out of him, and though what he was suffering was at the present more a dull shock than actual pain, he realized dimly that there would be pain coming shortly in full measure.

"Hugo?" he said.

Faintly blurred by the drumming of the blood in his ears, there came to him the sound of his uncle's voice. Mr. Carmody was saying that he was delighted. And the utter impossibility of remaining in the same room with a man who could be delighted at the news that Pat was engaged to Hugo swept over John like a wave. Releasing his grip on the table, he laid a course for the French windows and, reaching them, tottered out into the garden.

Pat was walking on the little lawn, and at the sight of her his numbness left John. He seemed to wake with a start, and, waking, found himself in the grip of a great many emotions which, after seething and bubbling for a while, crystallized suddenly into a white-hot fury.

He was hurt all over and through and through, but he was so angry that only subconsciously was he aware of this. Pat was looking so cool and trim and alluring, so altogether as if it caused her no concern whatever that she had made a fool of a good man, raising his hopes only to let them fall and encouraging him to dream dreams only to shatter them, that he felt he hated her.

She turned as he stepped onto the grass, and they looked at one another in silence for a moment. Then John, in a voice which was strangely unlike his own, said, "Good morning."

"Good morning," said Pat, and there was silence again.

She did not attempt to avoid his eye—the least, John felt, that she could have done in the circumstances. She was looking straight at him, and there was something of defiance in her gaze. Her chin was tilted. To her, judging from her manner, he was not the man whose hopes she had frivolously raised by kissing him that night on the Skirme, but merely an unwelcome intruder interrupting a pleasant reverie.

"So you're back?" she said.

John swallowed what appeared to be some sort of obstruction half-way down his chest. He was anxious to speak, but afraid that, if he spoke, he would stammer. And a man on an occasion like this does not wish to give away by stammering the fact that he is not perfectly happy and debonair and altogether without a care in the world.