“Well, with you behind him,” I said, “I don’t see how he can fail to click.”
“You are very good, sir,” said Jeeves. “The tribute is much appreciated.”
Bingo met us at Twing station next day, and insisted on my sending Jeeves on in the car with the bags while he and I walked. He started in about the female the moment we had begun to hoof it.
“She is very wonderful, Bertie. She is not one of these flippant, shallow-minded modern girls. She is sweetly grave and beautifully earnest. She reminds me of—what is the name I want?”
“Marie Lloyd?”
“Saint Cecilia,” said young Bingo, eyeing me with a good deal of loathing. “She reminds me of Saint Cecilia. She makes me yearn to be a better, nobler, deeper, broader man.”
“What beats me,” I said, following up a train of thought, “is what principle you pick them on. The girls you fall in love with, I mean. I mean to say, what’s your system? As far as I can see, no two of them are alike. First it was Mabel the waitress, then Honoria Glossop, then that fearful blister Charlotte Corday Rowbotham——”
I own that Bingo had the decency to shudder. Thinking of Charlotte always made me shudder, too.
“You don’t seriously mean, Bertie, that you are intending to compare the feeling I have for Mary Burgess, the holy devotion, the spiritual——”
“Oh, all right, let it go,” I said. “I say, old lad, aren’t we going rather a long way round?”