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you.’
    This
might, I thought, have been more tactfully put, but I let it go.
    ‘Right
ho,’ I said. ‘I’ll call for you at about half-past eleven.’
    You are
surprised? You are saying to yourself ‘Come, come, Wooster, what’s all this?’
— wondering why I was letting myself in for a beano from which I might well
have shrunk? The matter is susceptible of a ready explanation.
    My
quick mind, you see, had spotted instantly that this was where I might quite
conceivably do myself a bit of good. Having mellowed this girl with food and
drink, who knew but that I might succeed in effecting a reconciliation between
her and the piece of cheese with whom until tonight she had been headed for the
altar rails, thus averting the peril which must always loom on the Wooster
horizon while she remained unattached and at a loose end? It needed, I was
convinced, only a few kindly words from a sympathetic man of the world, and
these I was prepared to supply in full measure.
    ‘Jeeves,’
I said, ‘I shall be going out again. This will mean having to postpone
finishing The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish to a later date, but that
can’t be helped. As a matter of fact, I rather fancy I have already wrested its
secret from it. Unless I am very much mistaken, the man who bumped off Sir
Eustace Willoughby, Bart, was the butler.’
    ‘Indeed,
sir?’
    ‘That
is what I think, having sifted the clues. All that stuff throwing suspicion on
the vicar doesn’t fool me for an instant. Will you ring up The Mottled Oyster
and book a table in my name.’
    ‘Not
too near the band, sir?’
    ‘How
right you are, Jeeves. Not too near the band.’

 
     
     
    5
     
     
    I don’t know why it is,
but I’m not much of a lad for night clubs these days. Age creeping on me, I
suppose. But I still retain my membership in about half a dozen, including this
Mottled Oyster at which I had directed Jeeves to book me a table.
    The old
spot has passed a somewhat restless existence since I first joined, and from
time to time I get a civil note from its proprietors saying that it has changed
its name and address once more. When it was raided as The Feverish Cheese, it
became The Frozen Limit, and when it was raided as The Frozen Limit, it bore
for awhile mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device The Startled
Shrimp. From that to The Mottled Oyster was, of course, but a step. In my hot
youth I had passed not a few quite pleasant evenings beneath its roof in its
various incarnations, and I thought that, if it preserved anything approaching
the old form, it ought to be garish enough to suit Florence. As I remembered,
it rather prided itself on its garishness. That was why the rozzers were always
raiding it.
    I
picked her up at her flat at eleven—thirty, and found her in sombre mood, the
lips compressed, the eyes inclined to gaze into space with a sort of hard glow
in them. No doubt something along these lines is always the aftermath of a
brisk dust—up with the heart-throb. During the taxi drive she remained about as
silent as the tomb, and from the way her foot kept tapping on the floor of the
vehicle I knew that she was thinking of Stilton, whether or not in agony of
spirit I was, of course, unable to say, but I thought it probable. Following
her into the joint, I was on the whole optimistic. It seemed to me that with
any luck I ought to be successful in the task that lay before me — viz.
softening her with well-chosen words and jerking her better self back to the
surface.
    When we
took our seats and I looked about me, I must confess that, having this object
in mind, I could have done with dimmer lights and a more romantic tout
ensemble, if tout ensemble is the expression I want. I could also
have dispensed with the rather strong smell of kippered herrings which hung
over the establishment like a fog. But against these drawbacks could be set the
fact that up on the platform, where the band was, a man with adenoids was
singing through a megaphone