“You don’t mean to say you think you’re going to lug me into it?”
He looked at me like Lilian Gish coming out of a swoon.
“Is this Bertie Wooster talking?” he said, pained.
“Yes, it jolly well is.”
“Bertie, old man,” said Bingo, patting me gently here and there, “reflect! We were at school——”
“Oh, all right!”
“Good man! I knew I could rely on you. She’s waiting down below in the hall. We’ll pick her up and dash round to Pounceby Gardens right away.”
I had only seen the bride before in her waitress kit, and I was rather expecting that on her wedding day she would have launched out into something fairly zippy in the way of upholstery. The first gleam of hope I had felt since the start of this black business came to me when I saw that, instead of being all velvet and scent and flowery hat, she was dressed in dashed good taste. Quiet. Nothing loud. So far as looks went, she might have stepped straight out of Berkeley Square.
“This is my old pal, Bertie Wooster, darling,” said Bingo. “We were at school together, weren’t we, Bertie?”
“We were!” I said. “How do you do? I think we—er—met at lunch the other day, didn’t we?”