Expecting Jeeves (22 page)

I had to break it to him.

“Well” not absolutely this same waitress. In fact, quite a different waitress. Still, a waitress, you know.”

The light of avuncular affection died out of the old boy's eyes.

“H'm!” he said a bit dubiously. “I had supposed that Richard was displaying the quality of constancy which is so rare in the modern young man. I — I must think it over.”

So we left it at that, and I came away and told Bingo the position of affairs.

“Allowance O.K.,” I said. “Uncle blessing a trifle wobbly.”

“Doesn't he seem to want the wedding bells to ring out?”

“I left him thinking it over. If I were a bookie, I should feel justified in offering a hundred to eight against.”

“You can't have approached him properly. I might have known you would muck it up,” said young Bingo. Which, con
sidering
what I had been through for his sake, struck me as a good bit sharper than a serpent's tooth.

“It's awkward,” said young Bingo. “It's infernally awkward. I can't tell you all the details at the moment, but ... yes, it's awkward.”

He helped himself absently to a handful of my cigars and pushed off.

I didn't see him again for three days. Early in the afternoon of the third day he blew in with a flower in his button-hole and a look on his face as if someone had hit him behind the ear with a stuffed eel skin.

“Hallo, Bertie.”

“Hallo, old turnip. Where have you been all this while?”

“Oh, here and there! Ripping weather we're having, Bertie.”

“Not bad.”

“I see the Bank Rate is down again.”

“No, really?”

“Disturbing news from Lower Silesia, what?”

“Oh, dashed!”

He pottered about the room for a bit, babbling at intervals. The boy seemed cuckoo.

“Oh, I say, Bertie!” he said suddenly, dropping a vase which he had picked off the mantelpiece and was fiddling with. “I know what it was I wanted to tell you. I'm married.'

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